- Premier League football clubs cancel hundreds of thousands of fake accounts targeting tickets
- Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea all step up bans and block resale groups and bots
- Overseas resellers are using proxy services and bot software to flood systems
Premier League football clubs are stepping up action against ticket touting, cancelling hundreds of thousands of fake accounts and banning fans found to be involved in resale scams.
The BBC reports Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea have all carried out large-scale investigations to tackle the problem, which often rely on bots and proxy services.
Liverpool football club said it closed 145,000 fake ticket accounts in the past two years, and handed out 1,114 lifetime bans last season alone.
Investigators said the rise in bans followed manipulation of automated software and the discovery of mass use of burner phones used to conceal identities.
Arsenal told BBC Sport it had cancelled nearly 74,000 accounts this season and banned more than 7,000 memberships.
Chelsea said it blocked over 350,000 attempted purchases from bots. Recent research found bots now account for more than half of all internet traffic.
The action of these three top flight clubs highlight the scale of the problem, with resellers using overseas platforms to profit from inflated prices.
The BBC investigation found touts running operations on an industrial scale, with companies using memberships, bot software and proxy servers to buy tickets across Premier League clubs.
These are then resold through websites based abroad, leaving supporters at risk of paying well over face value or buying tickets that don’t work at the turnstiles.
Liverpool said it had also shut down 162 social media groups with over one million members that were involved in ticket resales.
On matchdays, it carried out nearly 400 targeted checks to block suspicious accounts from entering.
Arsenal and Chelsea have adopted similar measures, with new technology including multi-factor authentication and encrypted barcodes being introduced across the league.
The Premier League has urged fans to exercise extreme caution when buying from unauthorized third-party sites.
While the resale of football tickets is illegal in the UK, police aren’t doing much about it. Only 12 arrests were made for touting across the entire top six tiers of English football last season.
