Liverpool big crackdown on ticket touting revealed

Liverpool are the current Premier League champions

Liverpool have shut down 145,000 ticket accounts over the past two years as part of a crackdown against touting, BBC Sport can reveal.

They also issued a record 1,114 lifetime bans last season - a move that followed the discovery of mass manipulation of software used to buy tickets.

The Premier League champions said 500 people were denied entry to Anfield for trying to gain access with a burner phone - used by touts to avoid tickets being traced - in the last 12 months.

It comes after the industrial-scale black market in Premier League tickets was exposed by a BBC Sport investigation last week.

Re-selling is against UK law, but many websites continue to operate by being based outside the country.

The BBC found that resellers often use bot software and fake identities to hoover up hundreds of tickets to be sold on for higher prices, impacting fans' ability to attend games via official exchanges or membership ballots.

It can leave supporters paying extortionate prices, or being completely out of pocket after buying tickets that do not work, as well as undermining segregation of fans.

Investigators for Liverpool also shut down 162 social media groups - with a combined membership of more than one million users - that were involved in selling fake tickets that never materialised or reselling real tickets at extortionate rates.

Meanwhile, just under 400 targeted stops were also carried out on match days, preventing access to the turnstiles for accounts with suspicious activity.

The 1,114 lifetime bans represent a huge increase on the 75 imposed across the 2023-24 campaign.

Across the 2023-24 season, Liverpool closed 100,000 fake accounts, and believe new preventative measures including multi-factor authentication, single sign-on and the implementation of more advanced fraud analysis tools, have made a difference.

The club - which has more than 30,000 season ticket holders - operates an official sanctions process, where senior club officials and a member from an independent supporter association hear cases and decide on the appropriate course of action.

The majority of lifetime bans and indefinite suspensions the club handed down were for unauthorised selling of season tickets, memberships or hospitality tickets.

Liverpool is one of a number of clubs vowing to increase resources to target those involved in the proliferation of touting activity.

Arsenal say they have cancelled almost 74,000 accounts attempting to obtain tickets in unauthorised ways and banned over 7,000 memberships this season. Chelsea claim to have blocked over 350,000 attempted purchases from bots.

However, the head of the Football Supporters Association Tom Greatrex told BBC Sport that he questioned how committed some Premier League clubs were to tackling touting.

"Long-term supporters are finding it impossible to get tickets because of the way they are made available through secondary agencies," he said.

"This is becoming endemic across the game."

The Premier League urges fans to use "extreme caution" when using unauthorised sites and is introducing encrypted barcodes for digital ticketing which it says will make touting more difficult.

Only 12 arrests were recorded by the Home Office last season for ticket touting across the top six tiers of English football.

In a statement, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said: "The unauthorised resale of football match tickets in England and Wales is illegal. Legislation is in place to minimise the risk of disorder, with football clubs responsible for implementing their own strategies to prevent ticket sales to unauthorised resellers.

"While the law applies only to domestic resales, it covers any element of an unauthorised sales chain that takes place within England and Wales."