Oasis fans lose 'over £2 million' in UK ticket scams

Oasis fans wishing to see the reunited British band live in concert have collectively lost more than £2 million ($2.7 million) from UK ticket scams, mostly on Facebook, Lloyds bank said Thursday.

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“Fans of Oasis are being targeted by a surge of ticket scams on social media, as the… rock icons prepare to tour the UK this summer for the first time since 2009,” the UK lender said in a statement.

The chaotic scramble for the prized tickets followed the announcement in August last year that brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher had ended their infamous 15-year feud and were reuniting for a worldwide tour.

Oasis – whose hits include ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Champagne Supernova’ – kick off the reunion tour on July 4 in Cardiff before playing in their home city, Manchester, the following week.

Other venues include Buenos Aires, Chicago, London, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.

Lloyds noted that ‘scams often occur in two waves: the first when tickets are released for sale, and again as the event date approaches’.

Working from figures based on its own customers, ‘the bank estimates that across the UK there are likely to have been at least 5,000 victims since tickets went on sale, with over £2 million lost to fraudsters’ – an average of £436 per person.

Lloyds added that ‘more than 90 percent of reported cases start with fake adverts, posts or listings on Meta-owned platforms, with the vast majority on Facebook’.

Liz Ziegler, fraud prevention director at the bank, called on social media platforms to take ‘stronger action to tackle scams’ which largely breach their own rules.

Meta had yet to react to the report when contacted by AFP.

Britain’s competition watchdog last month reported that Oasis fans may have been tricked into buying ‘platinum’ seats that offered no additional advantage during the much-criticised ticket sale for their upcoming reunion gigs.

The Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation into agent Ticketmaster following widespread public anger over the exorbitant cost of some tickets to see the Britpop band’s comeback.

Ticketmaster sold more than 900,000 tickets for the gigs.

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