WA’s tough ticket scalping laws slammed after very few people fined in nearly two years

Tough laws designed to stop West Aussies being ripped off by ticket scalpers have been slammed as unnecessary after they were only used 37 times in the first two years of operation. Under the laws, implemented last February, ticket resellers can only ask for 10 per cent extra on top of the original price. Anything more as reported to Consumer Protection earns the seller a $2000 fine. In the past two years, the most scalped tickets were to Coldplay’s two exclusive Optus Stadium shows last November, with 16 fines issued with price mark-ups ranging from 53 to an eye-watering 507 per cent. One Queensland woman was fined for advertising four $1861 packages at a price of $4100 on a classified website. Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour last March saw three scalping fines handed out, while scalpers for Pink’s show this summer were hit with two fines. Overpriced tickets for Blink 182 in February and the boxing bout between George Kambosos Jr and Vasiliy Lomachenko both earned greedy resellers a fine. The biggest mark-up was for a group of 10 tickets in one listing at more than $2500 above the legal resell limit. Originally sold at $177.69, each ticket was advertised for $450 each in a closed group on social media. Figures to Parliament, provided to crossbench MP Wilson Tucker, show of 126 complaints of ticket scalping since last February, just 37 have been issued, and 27 have been paid. Mr Tucker slammed the high resale prices as a “non-issue”. “The need for tougher ticket scalping laws was identified back in 2018, it’s then taken three years for the bill to be prioritised in Parliament, and since then, only 37 fines have been issued for inflated ticket sales,” he said. “The lack of fines that have been issued shows that the WA Labor Government is more interested in being seen to do something and represents the set-and-forget attitude of politics. “The amount of time and resources required to create a new ticket scalping regime isn’t correlating with any real impact on the ground.” A Consumer Protection spokeswoman said the complaints were investigated only when a breach of the ticket scalping laws was suspected. “Upon receiving a formal written complaint, during the assessment process, a Consumer Protection officer may identify potential ticket scalping issues,” she said. “On conciliation the primary concerns may shift to Australian Consumer Law or consumer guarantee issues, such as failure to supply tickets, or failure to provide a remedy in the form of a refund or replacement. “During the conciliation process, information may emerge indicating that ticket scalping is not a relevant issue.“ SCALPED TICKET FINES