Football fans put a chokehold on would-be scalper

Choke’s price was almost five times the tickets’ face value, and yet this is a match – coming up on Wednesday at Rajamangala National Stadium – that everyone is clamouring to see. ThaiTicketMajor sold all 42,000 seats within an hour on Friday. Football-crazy Thailand has descended into delirium following the national squad’s victory over Philippines last Wednesday to reach the final of the AFF Suzuki Cup.

But, in a pattern now familiar every time there’s a big concert or some other major draw in town, even the people who were queued up when the ticket kiosks opened at 10am found themselves out of luck. Nor did the agency’s website offer any solace. 

So when this Choke guy showed up online at OLX saying he’d managed to get nine seats – six for him and his friends and the other three were up for grabs – folks were primed and ready. The storm was brutal, arriving online and directly by phone. Choke endured it, then went on Pantip. “I queued up from early morning and got six tickets,” he explained, six being the maximum allowed per person. “And then I saw that the queue wasn’t that long, so I got in line again and bought three more tickets.” 

It sounded plausible enough, and his “crime” became much more palatable when Choke further revealed that he’d found a buyer despite the sky-high price but, after all the complaining, had decided to forego the gouging.

“I got a buyer straight away – a man in Phrae who wanted to buy them for his nephews. We agreed on the price, but then I heard about the heavy criticism and I felt bad, so I reduced the price to Bt500 each.” 

He actually got that figure from one of the people who called him to tell him off. The caller suggested Bt500 would be fair, given the time and effort Choke put in at his end. With each ticket plus handling fee amounting to Bt270, that means Choke pocketed Bt690 in profit, again fair enough considering he’s likely having a few sleepless nights. 

The howling on Pantip abated somewhat and others logged on to praise Choke for being both honest and fair. He was being an opportunist, they said, not your typical professional scalper. Too many people are poisoning the popularity of sport and entertainment with their unscrupulous greed, and the official ticket distributors can’t do much to stop them from making huge profits. 

Mind you, staff at ThaiTicketMajor do need to be more careful when the so-called “ghost sellers” came haunting. At Mega Bangna you have to give your name and phone number, but tricksters show up armed with dozens of names to snag loads of tickets – including for this week’s footie match. “It was even worse at Siam Paragon,” says a sports reporter at our sister paper, Kom Chad Luek. “The staff didn’t even bother asking for names and contact numbers – so the scalpers just queued up again and again.” 

Shall we summon the police? Well, we could, but if they did manage to bust a scalper red-handed, the fine is a grand Bt500 – or, actually, “up to Bt500”.