Photo: Samir Hussein/Redferns
Adele at the Brit Awards last week. The singer has tried to deter the touts with limited success.
Scalpers offer ticket for Adele’s UK tour for £24,840, nearly $31,000 for a ticket with face value of $92.

‘Adele famously took on the touts, banning thousands of them from buying tickets, but as she prepares to kick off her long-awaited UK tour on Monday, Adele may have to concede she has not yet won the war.’

The four main ticket resale websites are offering seats for her 20 UK arena dates for more than 290 times their face value. Fans wanting tickets for the sold-out London O2 concerts are being asked on Get Me In – the resale arm of Ticketmaster – to hand over as much as £24,840 for a seat with a face value of £85. That figure includes a cut taken by Get Me In. Rival resale website StubHub is offering seats for Adele’s eight London shows for up to £23,600 each, including fees.

Fans of Adele – who won four Brit awards last week – aren’t the only ones left frustrated by ticket touts. On Friday, hundreds of followers of the indie group Catfish and the Bottlemen, who won the Brit for best British breakthrough act, voiced their anger on Twitter. Tickets for the band’s tour sold out instantly – only to appear minutes later at vastly inflated prices on ticket resale websites. The Observer found examples of tickets for the band’s shows, which originally cost around £27.50, being resold for as much as £328.90 hours later on the website Get Me In.
The band’s management company said: “We watched the presale and the general sale for the Catfish and the Bottlemen April tour dates very closely. The demand for tickets was truly exceptional, however we were really disturbed to see a very large proportion of the total tickets available in the pre-sale appearing for sale within minutes on secondary ticket sites priced at up to five times their face value.
“There is no way this is down to genuine fans attempting to resell unwanted tickets, but rather organised touts, automated large-scale ticket purchase programmes, or worse, tickets never reaching the primary market in the first place.