Iron Maiden Announces Plans to Protect Fans From Ticket Piracy and Counterfeiting

The British heavy metal band Iron Maiden will announce their first U.K arena tour in six years this coming Friday. The band have been long time activists in combatting secondary ticket selling website abuse. With the announcement of their new tour on the horizon, the band has also laid out a plan to help alleviate the problems of ticket resales.

Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden manager stated

“We do not want our fans being ripped off either by counterfeit tickets or through costly mark-ups on so-called secondary ticketing web sites. These problems now affect the U.K. more than any other country outside of the U.S.A. We believe the most successful way to prevent this is by implementing paperless ticketing. This proved highly successful in reducing piracy at our previous London shows in 2013 and on our North American tours since 2010. This is a simple procedure and goes a long way to minimizing the resale of tickets and reducing fraud by requiring the original cardholder purchaser to be present at entry.”

He continued

“We have been working with our U.K. promoter Live Nation and Ticketmaster to ensure that we can operate a paperless ticketing system, in full or in part, at all the U.K. venues we’ll play in 2017. We are also instigating a number of additional measures which we believe will directly help our fans to access tickets in the fairest, safest way and at the intended price.”

As of now, several steps are being put in place for the coming year. They are as follows:
1. The band will make sure that every venue will employ paperless ticketing.
2. They will work with Live Nation and Ticketmaster to make sure that in cooperation with paperless ticketing, each ticket holder will present a photo ID at the entrance of the concert venues.
3. Tickets will not be available for resale.
4. There will be a maximum of 4 tickets per person per show.
5. When tickets are not paperless, the ticket holder will still be required to show ID at the door.
6. There will be a team dedicated to monitoring ticket sales through the Iron Maiden fan club pre-sale and will report and investigate suspicious activity.
7. A customer support team will be available to deal with any of the legitimate issues fans may have.
8. The band will enforce the awareness of criminals and their practices when it comes to counterfeit ticketing.
9. The notion that buying a ticket from an unauthorized source is either invalid or counterfeit will be enforced.