The Ticket Queen used the details of family members, including a dead relative, to buy tickets, as well as using the names and addresses of dozens of people in and around the town of Diss, Norfolk where her business operated.

To sell the tickets, the touts used resale sites, which are known as the secondary ticketing websites.

The 'VIP' touts who made millions for resale sites

Touts were "working hand-in-hand with resale platforms", Mr Andrews told us.

A former staffer at Ticketmaster-owned Seatwave, who asked to remain anonymous, told us touts were "VIPs" on the resale site. "They were doing a lot of business for us. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions."

Some staff at Seatwave had a cosy relationship with touts, according to the former employee, who said he would take Paul Douglas - the Ticket Queen's former brother-in-law, also convicted of fraud - out for a pint when he visited London.

Resale sites make their money from fees paid by buyers and commission from the sellers - court papers show these could be as much as 25% of the resale price. Prosecutors calculated that Hunter's company received sales revenue of £26.4m over about seven-and-a-half years. Based on their typical commission, the UK's four main resale sites could have received £8.8m between them from Hunter's sales alone.

Getty Images Lady Gaga performing on her 2017 tour, wearing a black bodysuit with silver sequins and long black tassels. She has one long boot on a stage riser and holds her arms out to the audience as she looks up to the sky, with dry ice billowing in the bright stage lights behind her. Next to her, a man dressed in black plays what appears to be a Gibson semi-hollow guitar in a vintage sunburst finish. — The Ticket Queen fraudulently bought up tickets for Lady Gaga's 2017 tour among others

Touts who consistently delivered large volumes of tickets to customers were offered discounts by resale platforms, industry sources told us. During the case where he was convicted of fraud, Peter Hunter alleged that GetMeIn! - another Ticketmaster-owned company - offered him "incentives" for selling in bulk, such as £4,000 cashback if he hit sales of £550,000 over a three-month period.

Multiple sources told us that some touts also sourced tickets directly through relationships with promoters and venues, but sales at Hunter's level were far beyond what any regular customer could acquire legitimately from primary ticketing websites.

Even though the primary ticketing companies were victims of the fraud - as their purchase limits were breached by the use of false identities - Mr Andrews said none of the primary ticketing companies "directly supported" the prosecutions.

Another former employee who worked in Ticketmaster's resale technical team, who also wanted to remain anonymous, told the BBC his team would work closely with touts, developing software that helped them sell tickets in the secondary market.

"You have to build a relationship with them, they're like a customer basically," he said. The team would show touts products and ask for feedback, including if they made selling tickets easier for them and often showing them multiple versions, he said.

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