Impact Investigates: Crisis in Ticket Reselling

Anna Boyne

As the night-time industry faces ever growing challenges to its survival, measures to prevent ticket reselling scams are falling short. And its students are paying the price. 

Carpe Noctum, who run the official UoN Monday and Wednesday club nights, launched a partnership with OnTapp in March 2022 to combat wildly inflated ticket reselling. But now, the platform allows tickets to be re-sold at up to 200% of their original value.  

Upon the launch of their new ticketing strategy, Carpe Noctum released a statement:

“Ontapp Tickets uses blockchain technology to issue honest tickets that put an end to disgraceful secondary market prices that we regularly see on UniSalad. You will now be able to purchase tickets on the resale market via our official ticketing system at a capped price, set by us and not that of the reseller.” 

Less than two years later, these prices capped by Carpe Noctum are often above £20. 

When a ticket holder decides to re-sell their ticket, they put it on the OnTapp Ticket Market. The student re-seller chooses the price they advertise for, at a minimum of £5. Once the ticket is purchased, OnTapp takes 5.5% of the re-sold ticket price and a £1.50 transaction fee.    

“Reselling a ticket by more than 20% of its original face value is strictly prohibited”

The terms and conditions that each original ticket buyer agrees to state:

“Reselling a ticket by more than 20% of its original face value is strictly prohibited.” Yet the OnTapp platform allows tickets to be inflated by up to 200%.  

For a £9.30 ticket sold at face value, the buyer would pay £11.31 while the re-seller would receive £7.29. OnTapp take a 5.5% commission and £1.50 transaction fee from both students.  This totals £4.02. 

The same £9.30 face value ticket could be sold for a maximum of £18.60, in which the buyer pays £21.12 and the student re-seller receives £16.08. In this case, OnTapp take £5.04. 

Impact analysed ticket sales for the Wednesday 16th October Crisis event run by Carpe Noctum which can hold around 3000 students, according to its website. On Thursday 10th October, all tickets were marked as sold-out. The OnTapp marketplace advertised 11.30pm tickets originally sold at £10.20 for £20.23. 

The following week showed a similar pattern. On Saturday 19th October Impact looked at tickets for Wednesday 23rd October Crisis. 11pm tickets originally sold for £9.90 were being advertised for up to £22.39. 

Tickets to the Halloween All Frighter on the 31st October sold out weeks in advance. As of the 19th October, none were being advertised on the OnTapp Ticket Market. Although OnTapp was designed to prevent re-selling elsewhere, students on UniSalad were selling All Frighter tickets for as much as £28. 

Unisalad

UniSalad is a student-only app which allows people to connect with others from the same university. “About 90% of our traffic goes into the buy and sell,” Director and spokesperson for UniSalad, Liam Oflynn, told Impact when asked whether ticket reselling was its main use.

There are around 20,000 students in Nottingham using the app. 

Introducing price caps would be a complicated process for the secondary marketplace who facilitate re-selling of different club night tickets across the country. 

“We would have to scrape data and decide what an average price for a ticket should be,” said Oflynn. But this depends on a huge range of factors like venue, event, night of the week, and time of year. 

“There were also a lot of issues – scams being a big one”  

Oflynn and former co-Director Garad Nurie purchased the app from its Founder Rebecca De Beukelaer in February 2023. 

“There were a lot of things that Rebecca was doing right,” said Nurie. “But there were also a lot of issues- scams being a big one.”  

When Oflynn and Nurie first gained access to the admin site, there were thousands of reports which took two weeks to read through. 

One of the most common scams students report to UniSalad is double-scanned tickets. This is when a student buys a ticket through UniSalad but when they reach the front of the club queue they’re told its already been scanned. This usually means a student scammer has taken money from multiple buyers for only one ticket. 

“It’s very difficult for us to figure out what’s happened in that situation because we don’t have access to any information from the clubs,” Oflynn told Impact. 

In future, UniSalad aim to move into the primary ticket market. They would collaborate with club event organisers to sell tickets directly. This would enable them to change ticket QR codes upon transaction to prevent double-scan frauds- a similar system to the one currently used by OnTapp. 

“It’s just as difficult for them to decide who’s in the right and wrong as it is us” 

UniSalad introduced PayPal Payment Gateway Service to the app in May 2024. If a user has an issue with something bought through the platform, they can now contact PayPal directly and raise a dispute. 

“PayPal has solved a lot of problems already. But that’s not to say that it’s a complete solution to everything,” said Oflynn. Many users who have not updated the UniSalad app do not yet have access to the PayPal Gateway, which is continuing to cause issues. 

“PayPal still need to rule in favour of someone. It’s just as difficult for them to decide who’s in the right and wrong as it is us.” 

Students scamming students?

Reese Dera joined the University of Nottingham this September. She tried to use UniSalad to find a ticket for Crisis on Wednesday 9th October. 

However, Dera did not receive her ticket once she’d paid through the in-app PayPal Gateway service. The number of tickets available on the app then changed from 1 to 0. The seller saw but did not respond to Dera’s request for the ticket to be sent. Dera submitted a dispute to PayPal. But at the time of publication, she is still waiting on the outcome. 

UniSalad’s other solution is to block users who scam other students.

“If the user has a certain amount of reports against them already, then we can make a judgement and say look this person needs to be off the platform. No one that’s selling valid tickets is going to have that many reports against them.” 

Signing up to UniSalad requires a valid university email address which can only be used once. If a user is blocked, they cannot access to platform again. Similarly, OnTapp validates accounts using phone numbers to prevent the creation of multiple ghost accounts. 

“If you think it’s bad in Nottingham, you should see Exeter”

However, OnTapp have only set a 10 ticket purchase limit which leaves room for students to bulk buy upon release with the intention of re-selling at inflated prices to make a profit.

Oflynn noticed this trend on a wider UK scale: “If you think it’s bad in Nottingham, you should see Exeter.”

“There’re two main clubs in Exeter. As soon as they list their tickets on Fixr [another event ticketing platform], the app crashes because every single person in Exeter is trying to buy a ticket to resell… There’re people that have bots set up as well, and they’ll buy hundreds of tickets and then resell them at five times the price.” 

“It’s a very difficult place in the market to be,” said Oflynn. “We’re just trying to figure out the best way to ensure the safety of anyone that’s buying a ticket on the secondary market.” 

396 nightclubs across the UK closed between March 2020 and December 2023, nearly 10 per month, representing 31% of total business. According to Grant Thornton, nightclub operators are contending with reduced consumer spend due to the cost-of-living crisis as well as longer term changes in consumer behaviour. 

Ticket re-selling scams are making night outs more expensive and less viable for students, only further contributing to the declining state of the nightlife industry.

What Carpe Noctum have to say…

A spokesperson from Carpe Noctum said: “At Carpe Noctum, we deeply understand that students don’t always have much disposable income, and it can be frustrating when ticket prices fluctuate, especially in the secondary market. We work hard to balance the needs of all students and the realities of a lively event market, and we hope this response provides some clarity on our approach.” “Firstly, it’s important to highlight that there are always a substantial number of tickets available in the primary market at face value. For our CRISIS events, we make 2,300 tickets available at the standard rate, and typically, these are not sold out until just a few days prior to the event. Additionally, we ensure that 650 of these tickets are sold directly in halls of residence through traditional methods and at a discount, giving students there a convenient and fair opportunity to purchase them at face value.” “The implementation of the Ontapp platform has allowed us to bring much-needed control to the resale market. Prior to its use, we faced challenges with enforcing a strict resale policy, as tickets could be resold freely with barcodes passed between buyers and sellers, often in an uncontrolled and at times fraudulent manner. With Ontapp, barcodes are now dynamic, which eliminates the risk of fraudulent sales. This system ensures that any tickets resold are legitimate, giving peace of mind to students purchasing in the secondary market.” “While our previous policy aimed to limit markups to 20%, this rule is outdated and no longer reflective of how the market operates today. We acknowledge the need to update the stated policy on our website accordingly. That said, the average markup on Ontapp is only 38%, and while sellers can list at higher prices, they are reliant on finding a buyer willing to pay that amount. Most resales reflect a much smaller increase, with fewer than 10% of overall tickets for CRISIS being resold at all.” “It’s also important to note that students still have other purchasing options, including paying at the door at standard prices. We have even introduced systems like electronic queuing, allowing students to wait comfortably at the Secret Vault bar opposite the venue rather than in long outdoor lines in the cold.” “Lastly, we’re proud that as an official event, CRISIS contributes tens of thousands of pounds each year to the University of Nottingham Students’ Union. This funding helps support the wide array of services and initiatives the SU provides, benefiting the entire student body—including the Impact Magazine itself.”

Impact contacted Fixr but they did not return a request for comment.

Anna Boyne

Featured image courtesy of Seb Inoujk via Unsplash. Image use license found here (Unsplash). No changes were made to this image.

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