Christopher BarrettResearch by FanFair Alliance has found that three ticket re-sellers on StubHub’s UK website are responsible for 72% of the tickets being touted for UK arena shows. It also found that more than 20,000 of the tickets for sale were ‘speculative’.
FanFair Alliance campaign manager Adam Webb explains why the UK Government must do more to clean up the secondary ticketing market.
Last week, as the result of a long-running investigation, the UK’s business regulator, the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA), levied a £900,000 fine on StubHub International for the offence of “drip pricing”. The website is also being forced to repay £590,000 to more than 50,000 over-charged customers.
Astonishingly, for such a controversial sub-sector of the live events market, it is the first time any “uncapped” ticket resale platform has received any sort of regulatory sanction in this country.
The likes of StubHub International and viagogo have been the subject of multiple media investigations (many of them instigated by FanFair Alliance), they have been criticised by MPs and Select Committees for their disregard for consumer protection laws, forced to sign legal undertakings and court orders, and threatened with contempt proceedings.
Adam Webb
Some of their most prominent suppliers have even been sent to prison. However, the websites themselves have emerged relatively unscathed.
They continue to spend eye-watering sums with Google in order to dominate search advertising, and they continue to ingest huge volumes of ticket listings from high-volume ticket touts – without asking to see the receipts.
Even the one intervention that would seriously disrupt the exploitative business model of “secondary ticketing” – a legally-enforced cap on ticket resale prices – has been delayed.
Despite declaring in November 2025 that they were “putting fans first” and banning ticket touting, in May 2026 the UK Government opted to pursue the scenic route to change by introducing “draft” legislation.
As someone who has been at the coal face of this stuff for a decade, watching music fans being repeatedly thrown under the bus has become hugely frustrating.
The cost to those fans has been staggering. Even by the Government’s own hyper-conservative estimates, ticket touting displaces more than £100m from their pockets each and every year.
So, while FanFair welcomed the CMA’s intervention last week, and the decision to fine StubHub for their pricing practices, we are still left puzzled why other, arguably more serious offences, have not been sanctioned.
In order to highlight this, yesterday we made public some research that shines a light on StubHub International’s business model – and their reliance on a small number of touts to supply the bulk of their ticket listings.
In fact, following a forensic analysis of StubHub’s website, we found just three sellers were responsible for 72% of the tickets being touted at UK arena shows – two US-based companies (Ticket Evolution and Your Ticket Delivery LLC) and one registered in the UK (PCE).
Less than 10% of tickets came from private, consumer sellers.
Even more concerning, we found all the 20,568 tickets listed for resale by Ticket Evolution, and a proportion of the tickets listed by PCE were speculative.
All were still sitting – unsold – on primary ticketing sites such as Ticketmaster at face value prices.
This practice of speculative ticketing – or if we’re being semantically accurate “fraudulent trading” – was among the range of offences that saw two prominent groups of UK ticket touts receive prison sentences in 2020 and 2024 following enforcement action by National Trading Standards.
And yet here it was, absolutely endemic on StubHub International.
The entire website was being propped up by non-existent tickets, the majority from its biggest supplier with whom it announced a high-profile partnership in 2023, and advertising them to UK consumers.
As a result of these findings, I have written to the CMA’s chief executive this morning, commending the regulator on their action to tackle drip pricing, but urging them to go further with their investigations.
StubHub International clearly have many serious questions to answer.
But until someone with power asks those questions, and until we see some appetite for concerted action, then the cycle of exploitation will carry on revolving, and offshore ticket platforms will continue to prosper at the expense of UK fans.