Longford man jailed over Adele and Justin Bieber forgery scam

John Meade, who lives in Lisbrack, Longford was jailed for selling high-value forgeries for Justin Bieber and Adele concerts to members of the public.

The 44 year old man plead guilty at Cork Circuit Criminal Court to 18 counts of causing a loss by deception and one count of attempting to cause a loss by deception.

According to The Irish Times, the scam involved a woman placing ads for concerts tickets on the DoneDeal website with various phone numbers which interested parties rang to buy the tickets.

The woman would explain that she wouldn’t be able to meet the buyer in person but that her brother or her father would meet them with the tickets which they would sell to them for cash.

Meade would then turn up and meet the buyer and give them e-tickets which had been printed out in return for cash only for the music fan to turn up at the concert to discover the tickets were fake.

Several of the music fans contacted Ticketmaster who had referred the matter to gardaí and they began checking CCTV at various locations where people bought the tickets and identified Meade.

With secondary ticket-selling being such a profitable industry, forgers are increasingly tapping into this lucrative market, and music fans are very often paying the price for it.

Increasingly, artists like Radiohead and Ed Sheeran have urged people not to buy tickets from secondary sellers in an attempt to curb the exploitation of fans.

This all comes at a time when TDs are attempting to introduce legislation to tackle secondary ticket-selling. Earlier this week, we ran a story from the latest issue where we spoke to Fine Gael's Noel Rock about his efforts to introduce anti-ticket touting legislation in the Dáil.