Liverpool Football Club has shut down 45,000 fake ticketing accounts and 162 social media groups as part of a crackdown on ticket touts.
The club said that it had issued a record 1,114 lifetime bans, with almost half of these imposed following the discovery of mass manipulation of software. This compares to 75 lifetime bans across the 2023-24 season.
The 162 social media groups had a combined membership of more than 1m users involved in selling fake tickets that never materialised or reselling real tickets at “extortionate rates.”
As well as the 45k ticketing accounts already shutdown, it’s investigating a further 10k.
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However, this is much less than the 100k fake accounts that were created and closed in the 2023-24 season. The club said that this was due to new preventative measures including Multi-Factor Authentication, Single Sign-On and more advanced fraud analysis tools.
The club added that supporters should not buy tickets from unofficial online channels or from unofficial sellers, as more and more sophisticated and organised ways to defraud or extort fans continue to be discovered.
It stated that more than 90% of tickets listed on these unofficial sites either don’t exist or are touted tickets which have been sold multiple times.
