Five people have been arrested on suspicion of scalping tickets for pop star Jay Chou’s (周杰倫) December concerts at the Taipei Dome, Taichung police said at a news conference yesterday.
A task force led by the Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office has been investigating ticket scalping across Taiwan in conjunction with the criminal investigation corps of Taichung and Taoyuan, police said.
The task force suspected that a scalping group, comprising members based across the nation, might have modified a ticket purchasing program and applied it to ticketing Web sites to snatch up tickets, intending to resell them at a profit, police said.
Photo: CNA
To avoid detection, the suspects conducted their ticket-scalping activities at Internet cafes to increase their chances of getting tickets due to the faster Internet speeds the cafes provide, they said.
The task force conducted searches across Taiwan and took five people into custody, including an engineer surnamed Liu (劉), they added.
Authorities seized tickets, mobile devices and computers in the raids, they said.
Among the tickets that the group had purchased for performances around the world were 48 tickets for Chou’s concerts from Dec. 5 to 8 at the Taipei Dome, police said.
The scalped tickets for the Taipei performances were advertised for resale at NT$2,500 to NT$15,000 each, with the profit from resales totaling about NT$330,000 at the time of the arrests, police said.
The suspects have been turned over to the prosecutors’ office for further questioning over alleged contraventions of the Act for the Development of the Cultural and Creative Industries (文化創意產業發展法).
Chou’s December concerts are to be the first major musical performances by a solo artist at the Taipei Dome, which opened late last year.
The concerts are a part of the singer’s “Carnival World Tour,” which began in October last year.
They are to be Chou’s first shows in Taiwan in seven years.
Chou’s management company and ticketing Web site tixcraft said that the 150,000 tickets for the concerts sold out within five minutes after going on sale at noon on Wednesday.
More than 890,000 logins were reported on the tixcraft site to vie for the tickets, with most coming away empty-handed.
Later in the day, 3,000 tickets were re-released after payment failures and computers flushing out suspicious purchases, with about 800,000 logins vying for them.
Disgruntled fans who were not able to secure tickets soon found scalped tickets being sold online, with resale prices as high as NT$300,000.
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