Vincent Woods:   Island Pulse reported last week, police on the Isle of Wight,  are taking action against those who conspired to defraud the music festival organisers.  But what about festival fans who paid in good faith and then couldn’t gain entry to the festivals?

The news, if not, is a commonsense reminder of the importance of buying only from official ticket outlets and highlights the dangers of buying tickets or wristbands from unofficial websites, ticket touts or people outside festivals.

Even many of the well known secondary ticket selling sites offer tickets that they don’t actually have.  Getting a refund (which usually is in the form of vouchers to re-purchase from their site) is no consolation for spending the money for a festival that you can’t go to.

Worse still is the fact that sometimes unwary internet users are duped by swindlers on unknown ticket website while they desperately search for sold out festival tickets online.

Their search often takes them to spurious sites where they are asked to feed in their credit card details along with their personal information with the result often being that they are not just short of a ticket but also the subject of ID fraud through inputting their personal credit card information and contact details.

Festival goers are best advised to treat all offers of tickets for sold out events with great suspicion, and only make online purchases from trusted sites, and not part with their money once a festival has sold out.

Vincent Woods:  Isle of Wight Community News @Island Pulse.