TQ Tickets was a family-run enterprise which bought concert tickets in bulk from primary sellers online and then, once events had sold out, sold them on to consumers at vastly inflated prices.
Led by the self-styled ‘Ticket Queen’ Maria Chenery-Woods, her husband Mark Woods, her sister Lynda Chenery and the latter’s former husband Paul Douglas — who dubbed himself ‘Ticket Boy’ — TQ Tickets perpetrated a variety of fraudulent practices involving fake identities, multiple bank accounts and blatant scams.
Olga Kiptily, Senior Investigator with the National Trading Standards (NTS) Regional Investigations and eCrime Team, says TQ Tickets first came to the team’s attention in 2016 around the same time that journalists from the Guardian and regulators at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) were looking into the secondary ticketing market.
“The CMA shared some intelligence with the NTS Intel Team, who looked at the top three traders there were concerns about, and those three were selected for investigation — with TQ tickets being one of them.”
Those concerns were corroborated during the course of the subsequent long-running and painstaking investigation, codenamed Operation Zebedee.
Ruth Andrews, Regional Investigations and e-Crime Manager at NTS, says: “We looked at activity on the suspects’ bank accounts, which showed that they couldn’t possibly be buying tickets for their own consumption. Together with that, there was data obtained which made it obvious that the tickets were being purchased from primaries, then resold and marketed to consumers.”
According to Kiptily, the TQ Tickets empire was a close-knit, family affair. “Maria was the brains behind it all. She was mega-enthusiastic about the ticket market and about making a lot of money, buying as much as possible and covering as many events as possible.
“It emerged during the trial that Maria was not the most organised of people, so running a business really required somebody else who was a lot more business-minded. Lynda looked after that side of things, and Mark Woods provided some of the financing. Paul Douglas did a lot of the buying and selling, and he was also instrumental in recruiting individuals to assist with the purchasing.”
Wealth of evidence
TQ Tickets operated out of an annex attached to the family home in Norfolk. When NTS Officers executed a warrant there in December 2017, they found the operation in full swing, with several members of staff on the premises.
“We recovered a number of computers and phones, as well as a folder of credit cards, and a list of all the cards they were using and the amounts available on those,” says Kiptily. “The scale of the operation was very telling.”
As well as a wealth of financial data, the NTS team also uncovered evidence of how the TQ Tickets scam worked in practice. “There was a whole series of different ways in which they would commit the fraud,” says Andrews. “One was posing as consumers and not declaring that they were actually traders, which is a specific offence under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPRs). They were also not informing consumers that the tickets might be invalid because they were breaching the terms and conditions of the original sales.”
Another tactic used was ‘spec selling’; “They were selling tickets that they didn’t physically possess in the hope that they would get them later,” Andrews says. “When they didn’t get the tickets, they would send out false tracking numbers.
“They also sent empty envelopes that were torn, in the hope that somebody would think the tickets had been stolen in the post. They would use Tipp-Ex on tickets, and change the ticket type or the seat number. There was a whole variety of things,” Andrews concludes. “This wasn’t just about making a profit on reselling tickets they shouldn’t be reselling. It was about finding multiple ways in which they could exacerbate the fraud and maximise their profits.”
Cracking down
The TQ Tickets case follows that of BZZ Ltd, which was also investigated and prosecuted by NTS. In 2020 the ticket touts behind that company, Peter Hunter and David Smith, were jailed and ordered to pay a £6.2m confiscation order after being found guilty of fraudulent trading.
The scale of the secondary ticketing market, with some tickets being sold for as much as 290 times their face value, has prompted some — including the CMA and the Labour Party — to call for tougher rules for secondary ticket sellers.
Among those arguing for a change in the law is FanFair Alliance which, says Campaign Manager Adam Webb, “was founded by managers of artists including Arctic Monkeys, Radiohead and Little Mix, to deal with their frustrations over their fans being exploited”.
“Ticket reselling is a mass market where there is zero transparency,” Webb says. “Other countries are taking a stronger line on this — Ireland being the most recent one in 2021 — to prohibit the resale of tickets for profit. I think that’s the line we need to go down, and I think that will provide clarity for consumers.
“We need to draw a line under this kind of industrial-scale touting and rip-off of British consumers, and try to grow the proper resale market where if you can’t go to a show, it’s really easy to sell a ticket, and someone else can have it.”
The DMCC Act includes amendments to the Consumer Rights Act 2015, including measures to prevent secondary ticketing facilities listing tickets without proof of purchase; banning resellers from selling more tickets to an event than they can legally purchase from the primary market; and requiring secondary ticketing facilities to ensure that the face value of the ticket, and the reseller’s name and trading address, are clearly visible.
Challenges and outcome
In the TQ Tickets case however, says Andrews, “The frauds were so blatant that we didn’t need any other legislation because it was so clear — all it required was access to the bank accounts, and warrants at the home addresses.”
That is not to say that the prosecution was straightforward though. Challenges around the disclosure of evidence led to delays in the trial, as did the Covid pandemic. Another obstacle, Andrews says, was “the sheer quantity of digital material being recovered. I think that’s probably one of the key learning points from this case; we are dealing with digital disclosure in an entirely different, very structured, way now.
“The other challenge was the quantity of bank accounts being used. The amount of analysis of those accounts that was required, and the need for forensic accountants, led to very significant costs. These types of big frauds where there are multiple defendants, bank accounts and digital devices, can be very expensive for enforcement. And that’s why NTS is there — we are funded to be able to deal with those types of cases where local authorities aren’t necessarily in that position.”
Mark Woods and Lynda Chenery were unanimously found guilty of fraudulent trading offences on 13 March 2024;
Maria Chenery-Woods and Paul Douglas had entered guilty pleas earlier in the process. On 17 May at Leeds Crown Court, Maria Chenery was sentenced to four years in prison, while Paul Douglas was jailed for two years and five months. Mark Woods and Lynda Chenery were given suspended prison sentences for their part in the enterprise.
NTS Chair, Lord Michael Bichard, described the outcome as “another significant milestone in our work to combat online ticket touts”.
