Taichung police arrest five over Jay Chou concerts ticket-scalping

Taichung, Oct. 26 (CNA) Taichung police on Saturday announced that five individuals had been arrested on suspicion of scalping tickets for pop star Jay Chou's (周杰倫) December concerts at the Taipei Dome.

At a news conference, police revealed that a task force led by the Taichung District Prosecutors Office had been investigating ticket scalping across Taiwan in conjunction with Taichung's and Taoyuan's criminal investigation corps.

Recently, the task force suspected a scalping group, consisting of members based all around the nation, may have modified a ticket purchasing program and applied it to various ticketing websites to snatch up tickets for resale.

Authorities said alongside scouring various sites to snag up tickets from performance acts around the world, the group also procured 48 tickets for Jay Chou's Dec. 5-8 concerts at the Taipei Dome.

Police added that to avoid detection, the suspects conducted their ticket-scalping activities inside internet cafes alongside Chou's fans to increase their chances at getting tickets through the shops' faster internet speed.

The task force conducted searches across Taiwan and took five people into custody, including an engineer surnamed Liu (劉), police said.

Aside from the arrests, authorities also bagged tickets, cellular devices and computers as evidence.

The scalped tickets for the singer's Taipei performances were then put up for resale between NT$2,500 (US$78) and NT$15,000 a pop, raking up approximately NT$330,000 in profits at the time of their arrests.

The suspects have been turned over to the Taichung District Prosecutors Office for further questioning for violating Taiwan's Development of the Cultural and Creative Industries Act.

Chou's December concerts will be the first major musical performances by a solo artist at Taipei Dome, which was opened late last year for baseball games.

The concerts are a part of the singer's "Carnival World Tour," which began last October, and will also be Chou's first shows in Taiwan in seven years.

According to Chou's management company and ticketing website tixcraft on Wednesday, 150,000 tickets for the musician's four-day concert sold out within five minutes after going on sale at noon that day.

More than 890,000 fans logged onto tixcraft to vie for the tickets, with most people coming out of the experience empty-handed.

Although 3,000 tickets were later re-released after payment failures and computers flushing out suspicious purchases at 3 p.m. later the same day, there were still around 800,000 people who sought the tickets.

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.