Federal Court orders Viagogo to pay $7 million penalty for misleading Australian consumers

Ticket resale company Viagogo has been ordered to pay a $7 million penalty for misleading Australian consumers, after its appeal against a previous judgement was rejected yesterday in the Federal Court.

The ruling follows the Switzerland-based reseller having, back in 2019, been found by the Federal Court to have made misleading claims on its website relating to the reselling of tickets to live music and other events.

Appealing the judgement and the seven-figure fine imposed upon it, Viagogo was unsuccessful in arguing that it had not breached Australian Consumer Law.

With the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) having launched legal proceedings against the controversial reseller in 2017, the Court found that Viagogo had falsely represented themselves as the official point of sale for tickets to multiple events. It also found the company “drew consumers in” with a headline price for tickets, but did not adequately disclose significant additional fees they charged on top, including a 27.6% booking fee that applied in many instances.

The original judgement fined Viagogo $7 million, with Justice Stephen Burley saying at the time that the company’s conduct had been, in some cases, “on an industrial scale”.

On Wednesday, ACCC Commissioner Liza Carver said Viagogo had “deliberately misled thousands of Australian consumers about the price they would have to pay for tickets and falsely represented that those consumers were purchasing tickets from an official site.

She added that the company had “misled music lovers, sporting fans and other consumers who were hoping to get tickets to a special event” by not making their “significant fees” apparent until consumers were late in the booking process.

Carver noted “businesses must clearly disclose if they charge additional, unavoidable fees on top of the advertised price.”

A representative for Viagogo has since argued that the website had changed their practices significantly in the past five years, saying the ruling does not reflect the company’s “current ticketing platform” or the “many changes we have made to provide greater transparency for our customers”.

Last year, Tim Minchin called out Viagogo for reselling tickets to his UK tour at inflated prices.

On Twitter he wrote “NEVER buy tickets from Viagogo or other resale sites.

“They are cheating scumbags. Scalpers. Petty grifters. They buy tickets in bulk to deliberately increase scarcity, then sell them at hugely inflated prices.”