Tout is a semi-colloquial, mainly British term for a person who earns money by reselling tickets to popular events. In the United States, the practice is often called scalping. Typically, touts will buy large numbers of tickets for events such as concert or sporting events, with no intent to make use of them. Soon, individuals who genuinely wish to attend the event will find themselves unable to get tickets, as they have already been sold to touts; this then enables the touts to sell the tickets on at inflated prices, with no effective loss to themselves as they had no intention of using the tickets. A concert comprises a performance, usually involving some degree of formality, and particularly a performance featuring music. ... A sport consists of a normal physical activity or skill carried out under a publicly agreed set of rules, and with a recreational purpose: for competition, for self-enjoyment, to attain excellence, for the development of skill, or some combination of these. ...

Touts can often be found working the queues outside such events: buying tickets for greater than the face value from individuals who have them, and reselling them at a profit to people who don't. This has lead to the usage of the term occasionally being extended to those found outside such events selling bootleg merchandise or promoting other events (usually by passing out leaflets). A counterfeit is an imitation that is made with the intent to deceptively represent its content or origins. ...

A notable recent example occurred at the 2004 Glastonbury Festival. Tickets, initially offered for sale online, were sold out within the first few hours of availability; however, afterwards, large numbers of tickets started appearing on eBay and other sites. Not only professional touts were involved; many ordinary concert-goers had, apparently, purchased twice the number of tickets they required then sold the unused tickets at double the original price, thus effectively getting their own tickets for free. The view from the stone circle on Thursday afternoon, 2004 The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, commonly abbreviated to Glastonbury Festival or Glasto, is the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world. ...

Legal Issues

A further concern is that the tickets sold by touts may themselves be stolen, and that the money obtained from touting may be used to fund further criminal activity.

In the United Kingdom touting of football tickets is illegal under the Criminal Justice Act 1994; in other cases it is not explicitly prohibited, is a legally questionable practice, since the money paid to the organisers is actually paid for the service of attending the event; a buyer cannot resell this because, since it is the organiser (not the buyer) providing the service, the buyer does not have it to sell. The ticket is not a trade good in its own right, but merely a token used to facilitate the process of selling the service; typically selling it on will contravene the original conditions of sale. Efforts to clamp down on touting have included labelling tickets with the name or a photograph of the buyer, and banning people without tickets from the near vicinity of the event (where they might otherwise congregate hoping to buy a ticket from a tout at the last minute).

In America, generally scalping will be illegal on the premises of the event (including adjacent parking lots that are officially part of the facility). However, scalpers will generally set up shop on nearby sidewalks, or advertise through newspaper ads or ticket brokers.