Resale tickets: buying a sold-out concert or festival ticket without paying for a fake
It’s ten to midnight and the group chat won’t stop buzzing. The festival everyone wanted sold out in minutes this morning. Now a friend of a friend has a spare. There’s a screenshot of the ticket, a price well above what it cost, and a message saying someone else is keen, so you’ll need to pay tonight.
Most of us have been close to that moment. Plenty of people pay and it works out fine. Others turn up at the gate with a ticket that someone else has already scanned, and that’s a long walk back to the car.
You can buy a resale ticket safely. It takes a few minutes of checking before the money moves, and it helps to do things in the right order. Start with where you buy. Then the price rules in your state. Then the ticket itself, because a picture of a ticket isn’t the ticket. And last, how you pay, so you still have a way back if it all goes wrong.
Start with the official resale
The safest place to buy a resale ticket is the place that sold it in the first place. Some events run their own resale, and the big primary sellers have fan-to-fan resale built into their sites, such as Ticketek Marketplace and Ticketmaster Resale. Look at the event’s own website first. If there’s an official resale option, it’s usually mentioned on the ticket page or in the event’s FAQs.
Why does this matter so much? It comes down to what happens to the ticket. When you buy through official resale, the ticket is reissued to you, in your name or into your account. The seller can’t keep a copy and sell it to someone else as well, because what they had is no longer the live ticket. You aren’t relying on a stranger’s word. You’re relying on the same system that lets you through the gate.
That doesn’t make official resale easy. Tickets come up at odd times and disappear fast, and you may spend more time refreshing a page than you’d like. A few habits help:
- Set up your account with the ticket seller before the event sells out.
- Turn on any alerts the resale service offers.
- Check back in the last few days before the show, when plans change and people let tickets go.
If the event has no official resale, or nothing comes up in time, the other options need more care. Give the official route a proper go first, even if it feels slow. I’d take a real ticket that arrives late over a fast one that doesn’t scan.
The price cap in your state
Australia doesn’t have one national rule on ticket resale. Each state sets its own, and they don’t all match. The two that come up most for big tours and festivals are New South Wales and Victoria.
The NSW Government’s guidance on ticket reselling is quite specific. In NSW it’s illegal to resell a ticket for more than its original cost plus transaction costs, and those transaction costs are capped at 10%. If someone advertises a ticket for resale in NSW, the ad has to show three things:
- The original cost of the ticket.
- An asking price no more than 10% above that original cost.
- The location of the seat.
The rule doesn’t stop at sellers. Under the NSW rules, the owners of a publication must not publish ads that break them.
That gives you a quick test for any NSW event. If the ad doesn’t show the original price, or the asking price is well above it, something’s off. Either the seller doesn’t know the rules or doesn’t care about them, and neither is a great start.
Victoria works differently. According to the Victorian Government, its 10% cap on resale applies to events that have been declared major events. So for a Victorian show, the first question is whether that event has been declared. The Victorian Government’s ticket scalping information is the place to check, before you assume the cap applies or doesn’t.
Other states and territories have their own rules. If your event is somewhere else, look up your state’s fair trading or consumer affairs information before you pay.
One more thing catches people out. An event organiser may cancel a ticket that has been resold over the cap. So paying too much doesn’t only cost you more. It can leave you with a ticket that stops working, and a seller who has already moved on.
Why a screenshot is not a ticket
This is the part that trips up a lot of buyers. Most tickets now live in an app or an account, not on paper, and a picture of a ticket is only a picture.
A screenshot or a PDF can be copied as many times as the seller likes. They can send the same image to five people, take five payments and disappear. On the night, the first person through the gate gets in. Everyone else is told the ticket has already been scanned, and the gate staff can’t do anything about it.
Many mobile tickets now use barcodes that rotate, changing every so often, so a screenshot of one won’t scan. That’s good news for buyers, because it means a real ticket has to be moved properly, through the ticket seller’s own transfer system, from the seller’s account into yours.
If a seller says they can only send a screenshot or a file, ask why. Sometimes the honest answer is that they don’t know how to transfer it. Point them to the transfer option in their app and wait until the ticket turns up in your own account before you treat it as yours.
Some tickets also carry the name of the person who bought them, and some events check names at the gate. Read the ticket conditions on the event’s site before you buy. If the name has to match, a ticket in someone else’s name may not get you in, however genuine it is.
A simple way to think about it: a ticket is yours when it sits in your account, in your name if the event needs that, and the seller can no longer use it. Until then, you’ve paid for a promise.
Resale platforms that hold the money
When there’s no official resale, many fans turn to independent resale platforms. These sit between the buyer and the seller and handle the payment. The more careful ones don’t pass your money to the seller straight away. They hold it until after the event, so if the ticket doesn’t work, there’s still money there to come back to you. Some sellers on Reddit grumble that they don’t get paid until after the show, and from a buyer’s side, that’s the point.
Before you buy on any platform, look for clear answers to these in its help pages or terms:
- Is payment held until after the event? If the seller is paid the moment you buy, you’re back to trusting them.
- What happens if the seller recalls the ticket? Some tickets can be pulled back by the seller after they’ve been transferred. You want to know whether the platform refunds you, and how quickly.
- What are the fees? Work out the full amount you’ll pay before you commit, not only the headline price, and weigh it against what the ticket originally cost.
It also helps to remember who you’re buying from. Even on a platform, the seller is usually a private person, and buying from a private person gives you fewer rights than buying from a business. Our guide to private-sale fine print explains what you do and don’t get when the seller isn’t a business, and the same thinking applies to tickets.
This isn’t about one platform being better than another. Read the terms before you pay, not after you’ve been turned away at the gate.
Strangers on social media and marketplaces
This is where most of the trouble starts. A ticket offered in a comment thread, a community group or a marketplace listing comes with none of the protections above, unless you build them in yourself.
Watch for the familiar signs. A friend’s account suddenly posting about spare tickets, in a tone that doesn’t quite sound like them, may have been hacked. Message your friend another way, by phone or text, and ask whether it’s really them. A price well below everyone else’s for a sold-out show is a lure, not a lucky find. And pressure, the “three other people want it, pay in the next ten minutes” kind, is there to stop you thinking.
If you do buy from a stranger, slow everything down. Ask them to transfer the ticket through the official app and wait until it lands in your account before you pay. Or meet in person and do the transfer and the payment together, standing side by side. A genuine seller with a real ticket can usually manage one of those. A scammer will have a reason why neither works.
It’s worth running a reverse image search on any ticket photo they send, too. Scammers reuse images, and you may find the same “ticket” posted somewhere else, sometimes by a seller with a different name.
For the general warning signs, our rundown of marketplace scams in Australia covers the patterns that come up again and again.
If something does go wrong, report it to Scamwatch, and report the account to the site or app where you found it. It may not get your money back, but it helps stop the same person doing it to the next fan.
How to pay
How you pay matters almost as much as who you pay. Some payment methods give you a way to dispute the charge later. Others don’t.
Paying by card, or through a platform’s own checkout, usually leaves you the most options. If the ticket turns out to be fake or never arrives, you can ask your bank about a chargeback, or use the platform’s dispute process.
Bank transfers, PayID payments to strangers, gift cards and crypto are much harder to reverse. Once the money has gone, getting it back is difficult. If a seller insists on one of those and won’t budge, take that as your answer.
Our guide to buying a second-hand phone has a useful section on paying a stranger safely, and the same habits work for tickets. Check the name on the account, don’t pay before you have the thing, and keep every message.
If you’ve already paid and something feels wrong, move quickly. Ring your bank straight away, explain what happened and ask what they can do. Then report it. Waiting a few days to see if the seller comes good rarely helps.
Get in, not just paid for
A resale ticket is only worth the money if it gets you through the gate. Try the event’s official resale first. Check the asking price against your state’s rules, remembering that NSW and Victoria handle the cap differently. Don’t accept a screenshot or a file in place of a proper transfer into your account. Use a platform that holds the money until after the show, or pay a stranger in a way you can dispute. And if the deal comes with a midnight deadline and a seller who won’t wait, it’s fine to let it go. You’ll still have your money for the next one.
Sources: NSW Government, Ticket reselling (https://www.nsw.gov.au/business-and-economy/running-a-business/industry-specific-business-requirements/ticket-reselling); Victorian Government, Ticket scalping FAQ (https://djsir.vic.gov.au/ticket-scalping/about/faq); Scamwatch (https://www.scamwatch.gov.au/)
