CTS Opens Fansale Site

CTS Eventim’s new secondary ticketing Web site could be prone to small-time touts, but it should still help prevent a repeat of the problems caused when 2,500 fake Depeche Mode tickets were sold on eBay.

The company’s barcode scanners detected the forgeries and Daniel Jan Chairm – the man accused of being behind the scam – is in a Berlin jail awaiting trial, but CTS chief Klaus-Peter Schulenberg and promoter Marek Lieberberg were shocked at the numbers.

The new www.fansale.de Web site has been set up to enable people to buy and sell tickets that have already been scanned as genuine.

It’s intended to save the fan from the uncertainty of buying on eBay while forcing the forgers to stick to that site.

The plan for Fansale was in motion before the Depeche Mode scam. Schulenberg used a similar system during the World Cup that was so successful that it became obvious to develop it long term.

Unlike the U.K., where reselling soccer tickets has been illegal since the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, Germany doesn’t have a law that restricts reselling, and the World Cup site proved the demand.

CTS is hardly likely to object if sellers want two or three times the face value because commission is charged on the gross sale price. For this, the ticket is authenticated and the company oversees the transaction and ensures payment is made and received.

As far as small-time touting is concerned, which is becoming an epidemic in the U.K., the only thing the CTS site does is stop the selling of futures, or tickets the seller doesn’t actually possess.

Schulenberg said the CTS technology would quickly pick up on any multi-purchaser, or a seller trying to filter out a lot of tickets in twos and fours, but the loophole for bedroom touting may give U.K. venues and promoters reason to believe it’s not a blueprint for the controlled resale site they’ll soon have to put in front of culture secretary Tessa Jowell.

Schulenberg doesn’t seem concerned about the Viagogo resell site that’s forming in Germany. With CTS holding as much as 85 percent of the domestic Internet ticket market, it’s likely the great majority of the buyers would return to the same company to resell.

– John Gammon