TICKETS for West End shows are being bought by criminal gangs and then resold online or by touts in an operation to launder money from stolen credit cards.

Credit cards intercepted in the post are used by the thieves to buy tickets for popular shows by telephone or via the internet. The tickets are collected from the box office and then converted into cash by online auction to overseas visitors or the more traditional touting outside the theatre.

Successful shows are the worst hit because the thieves know they will be able to sell the tickets more quickly.

Producers of Jerry Springer — the Opera, a musical about the US television host, say that the show has lost up to £50,000 in sales since the show transferred to the West End after it was targeted by a gang of fraudsters.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bollywood-style musical, Bombay Dreams, is estimated to have lost £13,000 a year to fraudsters, suffering a higher loss in its first year when tickets were in shorter supply.

Jon Thoday, co-producer of Jerry Springer, said that theatregoers should be wary of cheerful-looking touts. “Happy touts are a bad sign,” he said. “Normally, touts are under pressure to sell tickets for a higher price than they bought them, but criminals make a 100 per cent profit on any ticket they sell.”

Mr Thoday said that a sting operation to catch the touts has begun. A camera has been set up in the theatre box office to spot thieves when they come to collect tickets.

He added: “We lost £15,000 in a month. It is a significant problem for us because the producer has to pay for it.” Carolyn Sims, of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, said that producers factored fraud into the cost of the show. “We know that it will cost about £12,500 a year for one show,” she said. “We try to absorb the cost because we don’t see why the customer should pay for it, but it has really come to the fore in the last couple of years.”

She said that criminals prefer to target hot new shows due to the high demand and limited availability of seats.

Ticket fraud is believed to have cost West End shows around £1.1 million last year. Although this is a modest share of the £400 million total lost last year to credit card fraud by British business, producers fear that fraud could increase to the levels experienced in America. Nick Allott, managing director of Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, said that during the Broadway run of Miss Saigon one fraudster was found to be using 1,000 credit cards to get around rules limiting customers to four tickets.

The Fraud Intelligence Bureau, which liases between banks and the police, said that new technology would help to eradicate much fraud. Over-the-counter transactions will be protected by new chip-and-PIN credit cards, that require customers to enter a pin number when making a purchase. Online transactions will also be protected using electronic devices that generate one-off pin numbers.

Ticket agencies are tightening checks on credit card transactions. Ticketmaster scrutinises purchases of more than £200 or made less than 24 hours before curtain-up.

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