Fans of Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift have been left heartbroken and out of pocket after an apparent ticket agency rip-off. Fans desperate to score tickets for Ed Sheeran’s sold-out shows at Wembley stadium next month paid “Circle Tickets” hundreds of pounds for the tickets. Sheeran fans were left heartbroken after the agency seemingly shut up shop without sending out tickets.
The Mirror reports that fans of Sheeran were not the only ones affected. Fans who forked out for tickets for Taylor Swift and Fleetwood Mac shows didn’t get their tickets, either. Fans of Sheeran and Swift have flooded banks, fraud investigators, and social media with complaints about the Glasgow-based ticket agency.
According to the Daily Record, Action Fraud, the U.K.’s national reporting center for fraud and cybercrime , said they were looking into complaints about Circle Tickets from Sheeran and Swift fans. Angry Sheeran fans were left distraught after the agency failed to respond to e-mails or phone calls when tickets failed to show up. It appears that the agency’s website has now been taken down, and the company has disappeared.
Fans of artists like Sheeran frequently have to turn to ticket resellers or scalpers when shows sell out minutes after going on sale. The resellers can charge many times the face value of tickets for sold-out events like Sheeran’s Wembley stadium shows. One Taylor Swift fan revealed that she had paid $500 for two tickets for the show in Manchester and has lost her money, together with the cost of flights and hotel accommodation.
Another fan who is nearly $1,000 out of pocket slammed Circle Tickets, saying “I am an ordinary hard-working mum and don’t have money to give away, this treat was instead if a summer holiday, now we get neither. Shame on you.”
It seems that the agency offering Sheeran’s tickets for sale did not even have an office. Instead, they ran a “virtual office” through Clyde Offices. This gave them a valid postal address. A spokesman for Clyde Offices said that they had withdrawn their services from Circle Tickets after becoming suspicious.
Many Sheeran fans will have been reassured by the fact that Circle Tickets used the official logo of credit card company Barclaycard on their website, but this, too, appears to be fraudulent, according to a spokesperson for Barclaycard.
“Barclaycard has no affiliation with Circle Tickets and they have been using our logo without our permission.
We will be escalating this matter to the relevant law enforcement agencies.”
Sadly, fans of Ed Sheeran will not see Ed’s show and face a battle to recover their money.
[Photo by Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images]