Viagogo, incase you don't know is a ticket reselling website based in Switzerland, where people can resell concert and show tickets. It is however owned by Jacob Rothschild and making them a mountain of money.

Most of their business is through music concerts of name artists. Basically it is a scam website and legalised scalping. Many countries have banned scalping (Selling show tickets in excess of their face value), but New Zealand, Australia and the Uk have not, in our case only a few A grade events have laws against scalping and these are mainly International sport (Read rugby and cricket only), and absolute A grade hot artists (Incredibly Bruno Mars and Celine Dion did not make the cut).

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Basically tickets are released by Ticketmaster or someother Ticket site that usually charges service fees, processing, insurance and ridiculous card surcharges on the tickets already, and they are bought up by scalpers and put on Viagogo straight away at inflated prices. Okay it is only silly concerts, but these people are scammers of the first order. On the site as you find your tickets, they have pop ups telling you that 100 or so others want the tickets and pressure you to buy and say the event is 99.9% sold out, when in fact these are lies for inertia selling (Illegal in NZ). Even worse is that Viagogo adds a 28% commission fee at the point of sale and this is not declared until it has your card details and you are paying. Often the site will show pricing inforeign currencies like Roubles and even Pesos, Kwanzas, Euros when you are in a dollar or pound zone.

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It is in the news here, as Viagogo sold several tickets to a Bruno Mars concert last weekend which were fakes and the poor people paid mark up prices for useless bits of paper. Seems beside blatant fakes, the tickets had been sold originally to named people and if the ticket was onsold the new holder could not get in. Viagogo also guarantees money back or equivalent tickets, but never respond to the complaints over this. Looking at online reviews, nearly all are 1 or 2 stars and complaints about a scam it is. The fact it is run by the most greedy and corrupt family on earth does not help.

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Do you guys have any Viagogo horror stories or have it in your country and what do you think of it?