Tout offers £1m of U2 tickets on StubHub, raising questions about ‘bot’ clampdown

Artists and industry figures call for culture secretary to ‘shut down the touts’ by outlawing resale for profit

One tout is advertising £1m of tickets for U2’s long-awaited 2027 tour through StubHub, raising questions about the website’s condemnation of professional ticket traders who use “bot” software to scoop up tickets and exploit genuine fans.

Seats for the four-night London leg of the Irish band’s The Greatest Show on Earth tour sold out last week, shortly after going on sale.

Fans chasing tickets appear to have been beaten to the punch by prolific touts using sites such as StubHub to charge eye-watering mark-ups.

StubHub listings for U2’s gigs at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London show more than 2,000 tickets listed by a single tout despite strict limits on how many can be purchased by each buyer.

Vladyslav Skrypka, who claims to be based in Harlow, Essex, advertised more than 1,800 tickets for one of the nights alone, with some on sale for more than four times face value.

If all of his tickets were to sell for the sums listed, Skrypka would stand to make more than £1m.

The findings come amid clamour from artists and music industry figures for the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, to move forward with plans that she outlined a year ago to “shut down the touts’ racket” by outlawing resale for profit.

A ticket tout ban bill is due to be published during the current parliamentary session, which might not end until well into 2027.

In the meantime, thousands of tickets are still falling into the hands of touts, with some listings bearing the apparent hallmarks of “bot” use, which has been illegal since 2018.

In an interview with the BBC last week, StubHub International’s chief executive, Bob Kupbens, said: “We don’t support bots and we’d love for both the government and primary to do a better job of policing that to make sure those kinds of things don’t happen.”

Adam Webb of the music industry-backed campaign group FanFair Alliance said that the sheer volume of U2 tickets on StubHub indicated either bot use or a practice known as “speculative selling”, where touts agree a sale first, then hope to procure tickets later.

Like the use of bots, “spec” selling is illegal.

Webb said: “StubHub claims all their orders come 100% guaranteed but have they seen evidence of Vladyslav’s receipts?

“Are they not concerned that these tickets may have been acquired by the kind of technology that Mr Kupbens so publicly deplores?”

StubHub International, owned by the US investment group Digital Fuel Capital, did not address specific questions from the Guardian about the listings or possible bot use involved in obtaining the tickets.

The company said it “does not allow speculative selling, and sellers must confirm they own, or have a right to, the tickets they list”.

A spokesperson said: “We are firmly against the use of bots. They are used at the point of primary sale, before tickets reach any resale marketplace, which is why we have called for stronger enforcement at source.”

Ticketmaster disputed the suggestion that it and other primary agents were responsible for bots, saying it blocked 20bn bots a month and spent millions on doing so. It said resale sites, such as Viagogo and StubHub, created the incentive for bot use.

A snapshot of StubHub’s listings, taken this week, showed 7,819 U2 tickets advertised for resale. More than 2,000 were held by Skrypka, with thousands more in the hands of other professional ticket “traders”, an industry term for touts, defined by selling more than 100 tickets a year.

Only 562 were from private sellers, such as fans who can no longer attend or use all of the tickets they bought.

A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: “We are fully committed to stamping out ticket touting for good. For too long, fans have been ripped off and we’re determined to right that wrong.

“We are bringing forward legislation in this parliament and will ensure that our measures are truly effective, enforceable and future-proof.”

The Guardian has approached U2 for comment. Messages to social media pages believed to belong to Skrypka went unanswered.