Scammed for festival tickets by a (former) friend

[HarveySY]

This is in relation to a problem my girlfriend has.

She agreed to let her friend buy festival tickets for Summer 2022. She paid £320 upfront after her friend told her that she couldn’t pay in installments because she needed to ‘secure the tickets’. Another of her friends paid the same girl £250 in installments for seemingly the same tickets.

Said girl refuses to show screenshots of email confirmations for the tickets to either of the girls, nor refund them. All of this leads me to believe either 1) she never bought the tickets in the first place or 2) tricked both girls into paying over the asking price and now refuses to provide evidence of the purchase or the associated commodities. A similar thing happened previously with holiday tickets but thats beside the point.

Personally I think it’s idiotic in the first place of my girlfriend to not simply buy the tickets herself but that’s beside the point. Was just wondering if anyone could lend any advice or point me to any statutes that suggest what this girl is doing is illegal - breaking a verbal contract, coercion, fraud… anything of that sort.

The goal isn’t to press charges, but make a serious case to this girl that we COULD, and hopefully resolve this issue with a refund, or the tickets + whatever the additional sum she defrauded her for was.

I also realize it’s completely my girlfriends fault and understand if she has no legal leg to stand on

Let me know, thanks!

[EnglandPi]

Let me put it this way, I buy a packet of smarties for 30p I sell one packet to you for 50p and one packet to your girlfriend for £1.

Is my making a profit illegal provided you got what you paid for?

[HarveySY]

Yeah I had that kind of thing in mind.

That wouldn’t be. I don’t thing I explained the situation very well in the first place though - my bad.

We’ll forget the other girl since I’m not really concerned with that part. Your metaphor is a good one but the situation went something more along the lines of this (replacing ‘my girlfriend’ with ‘me’ to save space)

You convinced me to let you pre-order a packet of newly released sweets on my behalf, telling me the store price was £1. You told me “hurry hurry hurry it’s going to sell out and then you’ll miss out”. You knew all along that the store price was in reality 50p, and it was not in fact about to sell out. It’s more disingenuous than anything illegal I suppose.

I assume that it would step into the territory of illegal if you failed to provide the sweets at all and kept them for yourself? Or if you never bought the sweets at all in the first place and simply pocketed the £1? Those latter two scenarios are the ones she’s more worried about. Whatever discrepancy there is between the real price and she paid her ‘friend’ can be considered a lesson paid for haha