Lady Gaga fans swindled as 80 pounds UK gig tickets go for 1100 pounds

London: Fuming fans hunting tickets for Lady Gaga’s sold-out UK dates ended up paying nearly 14 times the original value on a website owned by the official seller. Within 60 seconds of sales opening on Thursday, every ticket for the star’s two ‘Born This Way’ gigs had been sold on Ticketmaster.

Fans were directed to the firm’s sister company, is a secondary ticket site ‘Get Me In!’, where tickets costing 80 pounds on Ticketmaster were on offer at 1,100 pounds. Customers angrily condemned the scandal, with ticket organizers poised to profit twice. Darren Marsden, 44, logged on to Ticketmaster at the exact time sales began to buy tickets for his wife Michelle’s birthday, but it quickly became clear they were sold out and he was directed to the firm’s sister site. “Ticketmaster having such a strong hold on event tickets is bordering on a monopoly. The governing bodies should look into how it is allowed to distribute tickets so unfairly,” a leading daily has quoted Company director Darren, of Bolton as saying. Ticketmaster, the UK’s biggest ticket seller and an official outlet for Lady Gaga’s gigs in Manchester and London, takes a cut of about 10 percent from all tickets sold. As owner of Get Me In! it also receives a second cut from re-sold tickets. Get Me In! is supposed to sell tickets from fans who can no longer attend. But the fact tickets went on sale within minutes leaves that open to question — with many being sold by organised touts. They were going for an average 228 pounds. “We never divert tickets allocated to it for sale at face value to Get Me In! Tickets on Get Me In! are listed by those who wish to re-sell tickets,” Ticketmaster said. ANI