The people behind fan-to-fan ticket exchange website Toutless.com say it is growing again after an attack by professional scammers last year that almost prompted its closure.
The 16 year-old site, which now has more than 100,000 members, heads into its busiest week of the year as thousands of music fans buy and sell face value tickets to each other for the sold out Electric Picnic festival at Stradbally. Co Laois.
Though the founding of the site had nothing to do with Electric Picnic, the annual event drove membership for years and still boosts the usual number of weekly visitors from 30,000 to roughly twice that in the week of the festival.
Sixteen years on, Toutless.com has to rely entirely on the ongoing goodwill of its small team of volunteers. Far from a being flop, though, it has almost 105,000 registered users.
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“There were originally 20 members but we’d tell whoever we could about it at gigs and I think one of us must have spoken to a (former indie radio station) Phantom FM DJ because they did something on us, we became their gurus on everything to do with ticketing and the numbers grew to 10,000,” says Gary Devitt, one of the two founders, along with Alan Wickham, still involved in the site.
“It’s been going up ever since but Electric Picnic was always huge for us; the people who went to it were always huge music fans and that’s what our community was about ... people looking for tickets and others wanting to pass on tickets they’re not able to use without anyone being ripped off,” says Devitt, who now lives in Vietnam but continues to work on the site when not tied up with his day job, teaching.
The “ethos” of it all is an important factor with nothing offered for more than face value and plenty sold on the cheap by people who want some stranger to get along to a gig they might otherwise miss. Inevitably, people can try to milk the goodwill and Devitt cites the plethora of sob stories posted by those seeking Taylor Swift tickets for apparently bereft family members.
A small number of people being scammed was always also an unfortunate reality, but when most were trading paper tickets, meeting up and handing over cash, there were at least some inbuilt safeguards. These days, sales tend to involve Revolut and Ticketmaster transfers, which hugely increases the potential for fraud, something that came to a head for the site late last year.
“Scamming has been a problem right from the start,” acknowledges Devitt, “but we noticed a huge uptick the number of people getting ripped off.
“Everything pointed to a professional team of scammers who had a huge array of tools at their fingertips. We tried everything we could do, Alan’s got a background in IT security and knows his stuff, but he was struggling to keep these guys out of the website.
“It got to the stage where there was an honest conversation about closing down because the website was just a hobby and it was eating up more time than we could afford. Luckily, we decided to take a breather instead and we have restricted access to new members since, you need somebody to vouch for you, It’s helped a lot. We’ve still got our community.”
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