Milan-Cortina Olympics, anti-bagging operation: prices inflated by up to 236%

Only a few days to the Winter Games but scalpers are already in action: the Special Goods and Services Unit of the Guardia di Finanza, in cooperation with the Milan Cortina 2026 Foundation and the SIAE, which monitors sales, has identified a significant flow of secondary resale on the total number of tickets issued for each Olympic speciality and has raised the alarm.

The investigations led to the opening by Agcom of two proceedings 'against leading international operators engaged in secondary ticketing'. They marketed, to a large extent at overpriced prices, a huge amount of tickets, several thousand, for more than 100 events that will take place as part of the Winter Olympic Games: events that include both the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games, as well as indoor (ice hockey, figure skating, speed skating) and outdoor sports (alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, curling, Nordic combined, bobsleigh).

In terms of cost, admission tickets were offered for sale at an inflated price: the average of the surcharges applied ranged from a minimum of 122% to a maximum of 236%.

The Authority led by Giacomo Lasorella did not name names, but the online platforms of secondary resale on which the Guardia di Finanza monitored are Viagogo and StubHub. The former had recently ended up in the crosshairs of the watchdog and will have to pay fines of over EUR 40 million. The speculation, through the hoarding of large quantities of tickets and global resale, 'impacts both on users, for whom the possibilities of participating in events of cultural and recreational interest are reduced, and on taxpayers, given the implications of illicit secondary ticketing on tax evasion,' recalls Agcom, which has been engaged in the fight against secondary ticketing for some time.

On the basis of this finding, the Authority notified the platforms the notice of objection to the commencement of the "procedure sanctioning them for violations of the provisions of Article 1, paragraph 545, of Law 11 December2016, no. 232, also pointing out the individual URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) of the events for which it isfound to be the presence on sale of access tickets at a premium price for the consequentselective removal and/or disabling of access