Fraudulent ticket sales have become such an issue for a major Brisbane theatre that its staff are now being assigned to monitor scamming.
The Queensland Performing Arts Centre, like many theatres throughout the country, has seen a surge in activity from scalpers over the past year.
QPAC chief executive John Kotzas said daily tasks were now being done to combat the rise in ticket scammers.
"In the past two months we have had employees change their work pattern to monitor this on a daily basis," he said.
"We're looking for anything irregular and tracking it down."
He said due to the size of Queensland, a majority of QPAC's theatre-goers travelled from afar to attend performances.
"I can't emphasise enough how stressful it is for my team and the people concerned.
"Queensland is a big state and 30 per cent of our audiences come from outside of Brisbane; imagine if they had travelled from Townsville and you couldn't get in."
Tracking tickets overseas
QPAC is monitoring where bulk tickets are being purchased from, especially from overseas.
"If we know multiple tickets are being bought from Ukraine, for example, then we shut down that channel as quick as we can," Mr Kotzas told ABC Radio Brisbane's Craig Zonca.
"It does make our job hard but we really need to have an honest relationship with all our patrons.
"The commercial transaction exists because of the trust between people buying the ticket and the people offering it and we're trying to preserve that."
Educating theatre-goers
He said staff were also working closely with banks to try and minimise the amount of money people were losing on tickets.
"We've had some success with this, but there are times when people lose out," Mr Kotzas said.
"Legislation isn't the solution, it's more about educating the consumer — we will work hard to stop every illegitimate transaction."
Twelve months ago Mr Kotzas said the theatre thought scamming would only be an issue for high-profile acts with limited performances and limited numbers of tickets.
"What we're finding now is that it's happening in a long-running season as well, like Kinky Boots," he said.
"Theatre-goers are really unaware that they're buying tickets that are obtained from a stolen credit card or sold multiple times.
"We need to get theatre-goers to understand that they need to only buy tickets from authorised ticket sellers like the theatre itself, Ticketmaster and Ticketek."
