Well as predicted, we ended up selling out of tickets for Saturday of ACBF11 about a week prior to the start of the event. Great right? Well yes. And no.
Firstly cue the poor blighters that left it too late, forgot or wanted to check the weather forecast before buying. The deluge of "I only want 4 tickets", "I've been every year" and "we're hoping to join friends" was understandable, but not great for us, having to turn every single one down. We are human, and it's just difficult having to keep saying "no" to people that you know want to come to your event. I wonder if Michael Eavis gets the same problem...
Then came the scammers, those people (whose parents must be so proud) that chose a career path of fraud. We have contacts at the Potters Bar Beer Festival and just a few weeks ago, they had to ask Google to take down a website that was "selling" tickets for their event. It's rife... just tonight we've barred 10 "people" from our social media pages.
Oddly, the fraudsters nearly alway use fake accounts of women (more trustworthy, see!), usually have a poor grasp of written language and use the comments on a post even when we expressly say comments will be taken down. They are pretty easy to spot, but we try and take them down as quickly as we can, just in case someone is tempted to engage with them.
We can see who has bought tickets in seconds, thanks to the great Tito platform, but it is time consuming trying to block these... gits, especially when you're still dealing with the last rounds of admin before event days.
So, be wary out there if you see an offer that's too good to be true. A lot are saying that they'll take less than face value, but of course when the tickets don't actually exist, that's all profit to them.
If you do have tickets spare, then please contact us and we'll refund you and resell to someone on the waiting list. If you are on the waiting list, good luck. And if you haven't got tickets and aren't at the start of the waiting list, we're sorry you missed out this year, but lesson learnt for next time eh