In an article coined, "Ticket giants help touts make a killing at the box office back door", in the UK Sunday Times last week (behind paywall), the reporters noted that  some trying to buy tickets for Lady Gaga and Kylie Minogue tours on Ticketmaster were directed to Get Me In!, a trading platform popular with fans and ticket touts - reminiscent of the Ticketmaster/Ticketsnow catastrophe in the USA which caused an enormous amount of negative publicity and even spurred class action lawsuits. 

The Sunday Times ran a front page article and multiple page investigation into the secondary ticket market which gets its tickets from promoters, primary ticket sites and even the artists themselves.

Industry sources estimated that the official endorsement of ticket touting means as many as one in five tickets ends up on tout websites and is resold at an average mark-up of 60%. At many events the best seats are never even offered at the official box office. 

... Even charity tickets are being resold on Get Me In!. Ticketmaster was the official online box office for the Help for Heroes charity concert at Twickenham in September, featuring Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow of Take That, as well as Tom Jones. The tickets it sold clearly stated on the back they were “not for resale”.

The same tickets, however, were put up for sale on Get Me In! at an average price of £106. The face value of the tickets ranged from £46.75 to £80.

 And not surprisingly Rob Wilmshurst, chief operating officer at See Tickets, another online agency that sells about 9m tickets a year, said he could not see how  Ticketmaster can be poacher and gamekeeper.

However, Ticketmaster insists in the article that  it never provides tickets directly to Get Me In!, but does promote the company on its website to fans unable to buy tickets at face value.

The Sunday Times investigation also claimed:

• The ATP tennis world tour finals recommends that fans buy seats from a website used by touts which it supplies with premium tickets. Two tickets for the final on November 28 with a face value of £180 are being offered for sale on the site, Viagogo, at £1,699.70 this weekend.
• Ticketmaster, the biggest official online box office, directs customers who fail to find tickets to its own resale website, Get Me In!, which is used by fans and touts. Seats at concerts by Lady Gaga and Kylie Minogue are being offered for sale on the site at £900 each — more than 10 times the face value.
• Fans who spend hours trying to buy popular tickets on official websites compete with professional touts with access to software that can snap up the best tickets in fractions of a second.
• The government last year rejected demands to outlaw ticket touting — known as secondary ticket sales — despite being warned by the industry that the internet was threatening to turn it into an “uncontrollable juggernaut”. 

Eric Baker, the founder of Viagogo, insists his site has helped legitimise the resale of tickets and provide an open and secure marketplace. “Tout is a very charged term,” Baker said. “People have to understand we’re a solution to touts.” Viagogo says about half of the tickets on the site are sold for less than face value. Fans are also charged processing fees, however.

Some MPs believe ticket touting should be investigated again. Sharon Hodgson, Labour MP for Washington and Sunderland West, has tabled a private member’s bill aimed at clamping down on the secondary market.

“What I want is legislation that makes it a criminal offence to buy up large numbers of tickets, with a view to selling them at a profit,” she said.