Hunter, who was sentenced to four years in prison, and Smith, who was sentenced to 30 months, were found to have used dishonest and fraudulent tactics to purchase multiple tickets from primary ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster, Eventim and AXS. National Trading Standards began investigating the pair several months later.
Hunter was first exposed by a Guardian investigation into touts and their relationship with “secondary ticketing” websites, which allow buyers to resell tickets for events. The court on Wednesday gave them three months to pay back the £6.2m or face an additional eight years’ imprisonment, according to National Trading Standards, which carried out the investigation into the fraud. They benefited from their crimes by a total of £8.8m between May 2010 and December 2017, including a net profit of £3.5m in the last 32 months of the fraud. Together the couple ran BZZ Limited, which they used to buy and resell hundreds of tickets at inflated prices for concerts by musicians including Ed Sheeran, Madness, and McBusted, as well as shows such as the West End play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Their case was the first successful prosecution related to large-scale ticket fraud.
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