Italy police uncover €30 million ticket-touting tax evasion scheme

Italy’s Guardia di Finanza said an Italo-Swiss couple based in Sardinia ran an online ticket-touting operation that failed to declare about €30 million in revenue over five years and evaded roughly €6.5 million in value-added tax. The pair allegedly used a Swiss-registered company to resell concert and soccer tickets for events in Italy, then kept the profits outside the tax net before being referred to prosecutors for tax offenses.

The case underscores why ticket touting is more than a revenue problem. Under Italian law, commercial resale of tickets for entertainment and sporting events is largely banned unless it goes through authorized channels. Private sellers can resell only on a non-commercial basis, usually at face value or below. That makes industrial-scale resale a market-distortion issue as well as a regulatory one: fans get pushed out of concerts and matches, while operators with automated buying tools can scoop up seats within seconds and relist them at steep markups.

The enforcement challenge is built into the business model. Online touting is digital, cross-border and fast-moving, which gives resellers room to operate between jurisdictions and behind shell structures. Italy has tried to close that gap by pushing buyers toward official channels through AGCOM’s #ilbigliettogiusto campaign. But the regulator has also shown that fines alone have not eliminated the market.

In March 2023, AGCOM fined Viagogo €12.24 million after finding that tickets for 68 Italian events had been sold at prices as much as 10 times face value. Later Italian court reporting said the company was ordered to pay earlier AGCOM fines totaling about €40 million. In July 2025, AGCOM approved its first fine against an individual for illegal ticket resale, a €675,000 sanction. By January 2026, the regulator had opened two procedures against two major international operators over secondary ticketing linked to Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic tickets.

Italy is not alone in tightening the screws. In late 2025, the British government announced that resale above face value would be illegal, service fees would be capped and platforms would have to monitor and enforce the limit. The move reflected a broader shift in policy thinking: ticket resale is no longer treated as a nuisance on the margins, but as a consumer-harm problem that can distort prices, enrich organized touts and drain public revenues.