A mother wipes away tears at Anfield as she comforts her young son on a freezing night.
Liz O’Driscoll, who traveled to Merseyside from County Kerry in Ireland with eight-year-old Liam, has just been informed via Liverpool that the two tickets she bought for the Premier League match against Aston Villa are false.
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“They gave us the tourniquet scanner and the soft one got red instead of green, so they sent us here to the price box office,” he said. “I sent them to the winery to Ireland. This guy said he knew someone who could solve it and contacted him.
“I paid £200 through a banking app two months ago and the same day, he sent me the tickets via a link on a WhatsApp message. He talked me through how to save them into the wallet on my phone and other fans I showed them to on the bus earlier said they looked genuine.
“Now they tell me they are failures. I tried calling him several times, but his phone is off. This bothers me so much. It’s Liam’s first to Anfield and he hasn’t spoken about anything else for weeks. That’s why I’m so emotional.
In the previous hour, stories followed followers who had been scammed.
“I can’t let it happen,” said Dylan Williams, who had led Porthcawl for five hours in south Wales with two friends after buying a secondary ticket site. “They just told me we’d been scammed. I’m so gutted. £270 each down the drain. People who do this will have to go to prison. They ruin people’s lives. ” “
A state administrator near a fluorescent jacket shakes his head. “Previously, you would only see this kind of thing when the big games have arrived, but now every game of the house happens,” he said. “Becomes more and more worse. “
GO DEEPER
When fans visit Anfield for the first time: ‘It was hard to hold back the tears’
Now that Arne Slot’s Liverpool are the best in the Premier League, the best in the Champions League and the semi-finals of the Carabao Cup, there is a buzz of excitement around Anfield.
The redevelopment of the Anfield Road support would possibly have a larger stadium capacity beyond 60,000 last year, however, it requires seats still to exceed supply.
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Liverpool have 28,000 season ticket holders and a further 11,000 tickets per game are hospitality seats. Visiting teams receive around 3,000 tickets, with the rest sold to members (who pay an annual fee of between £37 and £46) via a ballot.
The season ticket waiting list has been closed since 2017. Some of those who finally got the call when the redevelopment was complete had been on it for over 25 years.
With so many fans having little hope of obtaining general admission tickets through official channels, touts are capitalising as they illegally sell genuine tickets at hugely inflated prices. Others are fraudulently selling fake or cloned tickets, with Liverpool’s data showing that international supporters, many of whom are trying to visit Anfield for the first time, are being particularly targeted.
Arguably, the move from paper to virtual tickets in recent years has made it less difficult for scalpers to operate, as they no longer have to walk around Anfield on good health days. Now the bragging operation has turned into an increasingly complicated multi-million pound operation, involving organised criminal gangs both on Merseyside and elsewhere.
Liverpool discovered that the gangs were seeking to infiltrate ticket sales by applying for jobs at Anfield and also attempted to intimidate club workers to obtain tickets. In July and November 2024, online sales for members were subject to sustained cyberattacks designed to illegally collect tickets.
Today, Liverpool are fighting back. Last season, the club shut down around 100,000 fake ticketing accounts as a result of suspicious online activity, cancelled 1,500 tickets and issued 47 lifetime bans and 136 indefinite suspensions.
So far this season, they have deactivated just under 20,000 ticketing accounts, cancelled 1,200 tickets, and issued 47 lifetime bans or indefinite suspensions. That final figure is expected to be a lot higher come May as a host of investigations continue.
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Liverpool have three permanent members of staff dedicated to touting and sanctions regarding stadium and online behaviour. They are supplemented by a matchday touting response team of stewards.
The resources are committed to the analysis of knowledge, which is helping to detect anomalies in sales and distribution through deeper controls of the accounts obtained by tickets.
Given the element of organized crime, it is not necessary to name the club leaders who lead the fight, although some talked to The Athletic under anonymity to reveal the scope of the problem.
Liverpool are aware that many scalpers operate via mobile phones rather than passing prices on to investors. One formula is for fans to hand over their passport in exchange for a phone with a ticket with the price. A post-match meeting point is then arranged for them to return.
Other touts are even more brazen and will actually scan buyers in at the turnstiles. They don’t want to forward tickets on as they would lose the credit for future sales.
Consequently, it is difficult to encrypt exactly the amount of seats announced in Anfield, but club officials are in thousands for each house in the house.
Since the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in 1994, it has been illegal under UK law to sell or offer to sell tickets to football matches in England and Wales without the authorization of the organisers. Liverpool are running hard with Merseyside Police to seek criminal convictions for those who do so.
Before last month’s Premier League match against Manchester City at Anfield, a man suspected of being involved in the ticketing was arrested by officials outside the stadium and stole around £2,800 in cash, which was confiscated. He has since been released under investigation while investigations continue.
Chief Inspector Chris Barnes told Athletic: “At all times we will take steps to protect genuine enthusiasts who suffer from promotions while all they are looking to do is buy tickets to support their TeamArray
“Ticket touts want to exploit passionate fans to line their own pockets — and it won’t be tolerated by Merseyside Police. We believe the majority of ticket touts target visitors to the city who have little or no experience in purchasing tickets, so may not be aware that the prices they are paying are vastly inflated or that the way they have been sold is illegal.
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“Ticket distributors will also sell invalid or tampered tickets, and enthusiasts will be turned away at the gates with no chance of getting their money back. Our activities to target resellers operating online and on qualifying days will continue.
“Liverpool welcomes several thousand tourists every year and we are determined to ensure that those who come to our city have a safe and fun moment protected from such fraud. Our recommendation to football enthusiasts is clear: do not buy tickets”
The club has assisted in two major investigations into fraud relating to Liverpool ticket sales, one with Merseyside Police and one with North Yorkshire Police. The combined proceeds of those alleged frauds are estimated to be around £8m.
Conducting a test purchase with one website enabled Liverpool to establish who was behind it before they passed information on the police. It turned out those involved had set up hundreds of individual ticketing accounts within the club’s online systems.
There is a feeling of frustration among club staff due to the slowness of the criminal justice formula in the United Kingdom. They consider that the rules of sentence do not have a sufficient deterrent effect given the amount of cash involved.
Last August, two men from Mersyside, John Stuart and Greg O’Neill, were declared guilty during the races by the Liverpool crown of having fraud thousands of pounds sterling before the final of the Champions League against Real Madrid in Paris in Paris In 2022. Array and O’Neill won a two -year network request.
In October, John Gill, from the Liverpool suburb of Fazakerley, sentenced to 17 weeks in criminal after pleading to blame to promoting two faux tickets out of doors Anfield before Jurgen Klopp’s farewell fit opposed to Wolverhampton Wanderers in May.
Liverpool are a change in tactics as they move down the path of civil action in the form of asset recovery as they look to hit the resellers in the pocket.
A main headache for the club are the secondary ticket sites registered abroad, and outside the doors the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom if the tickets are false.
In footballtickts. com, several tickets are announced for this Sunday’s match with Manchester United in Madrid. A venue at the Anfield Road stand, with a nominal price of £50, is on sale for £349; plus a £104. 70 “service fee”, the total cost amounts to £453. 70.
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It is the same site that Dylan Williams and his two friends say they bought tickets from for Liverpool’s home game with Aston Villa in November. They paid £270 each but then learned that only one of the three tickets was genuine.
“We got sent a link which brings up this QR code on a members card,” explains Dylan’s friend David Davis. “It looks legit but the staff in the ticket office have told us they’re fakes. I’m furious. Someone has made some serious money off us. We’ll have to find a pub to watch the game instead.”
After being approached by The Athletic, LiveFootballTickets.com said in a statement: “We can assure you that any tickets purchased with us are valid and genuine. We do not work with any ticket suppliers that provide fake tickets.
“We have been online for over 15 years, serving fans from all over the world. We have over 5,000 reviews on TrustPilot, with the vast majority being excellent.
“On the very unlikely occasion that you do not get the tickets you ordered in time for the adjustment or have problems with the tickets, and it is the fault of the distributor, we will refund one hundred percent of your cash and offer that we will offer you is a credits value 50% of your original purchase towards some other adjustment. Every distributor on our website is reviewed and approved through us.
When asked how they can justify the sale of tickets at 10 times their nominal value, they added: “We are an online market. We read any publication, we allow others to list the tickets and establish their own prices.
“Availability and prices are driven by market demand. They are not determined by LiveFootballTickets.”
Liverpool See applications that reflect the appearance of genuine tickets, not only deceive visitors for the first time to Anfield.
There have been examples this season of scammers promoting the same price price ticket up to a dozen times. The first of those enthusiasts to check out to gain to the stadium enters, yet for the rest there is just a sinking feeling as the red gentle flashes as their price price ticket is scanned at the turnstiles.
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Liverpool have contacted social media companies in the hope they would help combat scams being run on their sites but they have shown little interest in joining the fight.
There is a dedicated page on the club website where fans are asked to report touting and the regular bulletins staff receive make heartbreaking reading. Earlier this season, a family of four flew over from Belfast for a child’s birthday and paid £800 per ticket. They were all fake. With the game completely sold out, there was nothing ticket office staff could do.
Liverpool has invested more money in security and implemented new tools.
They established that the sale of 500 £9 tickets for each home match to fans with an L postcode (a policy designed to help local fans access games) was getting “absolutely destroyed by touts”.
Sometimes, last season, up to 85,000 “others” enrolled in each of those ballots. Liverpool has to change the regulations so that a single payment card cannot be associated with more than four accounts. In the lists for the next game at home, only 6,000 was reduced as life became more complicated for the resellers who sought to get tickets.
Now there is a two -day registration effectiveness before the local general sale, which provides club with evaluation knowledge that has been recorded.
On the day that Slot’s side played Real Madrid in the Champions League in November, Liverpool cancelled 200 tickets which they believed had been accessed by touts with numerous accounts.
“Do you know how many of the other people affected have contacted us to ask why?These were exclusive numbers,” a staff member shows. “If I’m a true LFC fan and you canceled my price ticket to Real Madrid, I’d be furious. Even those who were given contact with what happened, once we asked for an ID card so we knew who we were talking to, they subsidized and we didn’t hear anything else. “
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Outside the countryside, Liverpool has joined forces with its premiere rivals, Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal, in the fight against vandalism. This season meetings have been held to share knowledge and data on what works in terms of online controls. accounts and sales.
“We won’t eliminate touting but I believe we can get to a position where it’s marginal and we’ve got buy-in from senior executives with the resources to try to achieve that,” the Liverpool staff member adds. “A lot of things have to happen to get there but we have a duty to protect the wider fanbase.”
As for Liz O’Driscoll, after being scammed out of £200, someone heard her story and was able to sort two tickets at the face price for the game opposite Villa.
“I feel very relieved by Liam,” he said. “He is very satisfied to go to Anfield for the first time. I know that other people who have sold imitations have not been so lucky.
“How do those other people sleep at night after tear other people?”
(Main photos: Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton)