She was known as the Ticket Queen; and the tickets Maria Chenery-Woods touted certainly came with royal price tags.
One pair of tickets for the sought-after Last Night Of The Proms, an event concert-goers typically only become eligible to buy tickets for if they attend other concerts in the Royal Albert Hall series, sold for £462 each, a whopping ten times the £47 face value.
Then there were the in-demand seats at the West End production of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child — two tickets in the stalls at £725 each, a mark-up of more than 500 per cent.
Taylor Swift at Wembley, boxer Anthony Joshua taking on Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley, Cirque du Soleil, Ed Sheeran; whatever performance the customer was looking for, Chenery-Woods, or more pointedly her business, TQ Tickets (the TQ standing for Ticket Queen) was the woman with the answer.
Maria Chenery-Woods made £6.5m during her immoral tick-touting business operation
Indeed, so comprehensively did Chenery-Woods, a 54-year-old mother-of-three, capture her particular corner of the lucrative, but morally and legally murky world of ticket touting, that in a two-year period her firm sold an extraordinary £6.5 million in tickets.
The fraudulent enterprise was founded on one immutable truth: the passion of innocent fans for their favourite artists.
Thus, operating from a barn conversion in the Norfolk village of Dickleburgh and nearby offices, Chenery-Woods and her team — including her husband Mark Woods, 60, sister Lynda Chenery, 51, and Lynda’s former husband Paul Douglas, 56 — oversaw a scheme in which they would hoover up legitimate tickets through fraudulent means and then sell them on at sky-high prices.
In their mission to accumulate tickets, there were, it would seem, no lengths to which the family would not go; the identities of the Chenery-Woods’ children (the youngest just ten years old) were used to buy tickets under multiple names; they even deployed the name and address of the sisters’ dead uncle to bolster their ticket supplies.
The unscrupulous workings of the ‘family business’ were laid bare this week, when Mark Woods and Lynda Chenery were unanimously found guilty of fraudulent trading at the end of a trial brought by Trading Standards at Leeds Crown Court; Chenery-Woods and Douglas had already admitted the same charge and all four now await sentence.
She operated the business out of her sprawling cottage home in Norfolk
Fraudulent trading carries a ten-year maximum prison sentence.
When National Trading Standards charged the defendants in the TQ Tickets case, it also brought a similar criminal prosecution against a couple who ran a similar London-based firm BZZ. Peter Hunter and David Smith were jailed for four years and 30 months respectively in February 2020, and were later ordered by the court to pay back more than £6.2 million.
So just who is the self-titled Ticket Queen (her co-conspirator Douglas called himself Ticket Boy) and how did an outwardly respectable mother from rural Norfolk, a ‘village girl’ as observers remarked to the Mail this week, become queen of the touts?
At the sprawling £700,000 converted home with swimming pool and assorted outbuildings where Chenery-Woods and her salesman husband live, there was no indication that this was once the bustling hub of a multi-million pound business.
Nobody answered the door of the property, but Mark Woods, who as an executive with a tech company was able to obtain NFL tickets to be resold, does speak to me on the phone, protesting his innocence and studiously maintaining that even now — six years after Trading Standards investigators swooped — that he still didn’t entirely understand ‘where things went wrong’ for his wife.
‘Maria really isn’t in a good place to talk about things,’ he insists. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, she spends most of her time in bed. She is broken.’
The businessman, who provided more than £1 million to his wife’s firm to buy tickets and supplied multiple debit and credit cards to help prop up the mammoth enterprise, has more to say on his own ‘innocence’ than he does on the actions of his wife.
‘At the end of the day, I work in a different industry, I didn’t think my wife was doing anything untoward. My knowledge of her business was probably about as good as hers of my business.
‘I am just collateral damage, I am just a husband who supported his wife at the end of the day.’
As for his wife, he insists her reputation was that of a ‘decent, honest person’.
Mark Woods, the ‘Ticket Queens’ husband is standing by his wife saying she is ‘broken’
Confronted by the unpalatable truth that several aspects of the case against him and his wife (not least using the details of a dead family member) do not exactly scream honesty, he says: ‘I agree with you. And for those reasons there are things that need to be answered from Maria’s perspective and had I been more diligent, I think matters may have been quite different.
‘But I trusted her, I love her and for whatever reason, things started to cross the line I guess, and that’s a pity.’
He pauses, adding: ‘Understatement of the year.’ Quite. Continuing in a similar vein, Mark insists he, too, has been brought to the brink and, extraordinarily, paints himself as a victim.
‘It’s not a murder. At the end of the day I am just a broken man that wouldn’t hurt a fly. I am very sad to feel at this stage in my career that my future is blighted and I stand to lose everything, for what?’
For what indeed. Mark might protest that the family enterprise was a ‘victimless crime’. But anyone who has paid through the nose for tickets, or worse, paid for tickets that haven’t materialised would say otherwise, as too might some of those associates roped in to the operation to buy tickets to be resold in exchange for ‘perks’ such as hampers, gift vouchers or even a cut of the profits.
The pair were found guilty at Leeds Crown Court for their huge ticket-touting operation
As Lord (Michael) Bichard, chairman of National Trading Standards, said in the wake of the verdicts: ‘Millions of people spend their hard-earned money on tickets for music concerts and sporting events each year. Buying a ticket in good faith and discovering it is part of a fraudulent scam can be deeply distressing and can have a considerable financial impact on consumers.’
Quite how much Chenery-Woods and co have made from their sophisticated scheme is unclear, but Ruth Andrews, who led the team investigating the family, says a significant proportion of the money raked in by TQ Tickets was profit, running into ‘millions’.
It could not be further removed from the family business into which sisters Maria and Lynda Chenery were born, daughters of a well-known Norfolk businessman who ran a large coach company, until his death in 1993.
‘Her father would turn over in his grave if he knew [what she had done]; he was a hardworking businessman,’ says one family friend.
TQ Tickets was incorporated in 2006 with both Chenery-Woods and her husband as directors and her sister as company secretary. It rapidly grew from a travel company, selling tickets and transport to events, into something else entirely.
And while Chenery-Woods, who keeps chickens at her comfortable village home, was the ‘driving force’ of the dishonest scheme (she was ‘obsessed with ticket touting,’ the court heard), all four had ‘important roles’ to play.
Many businesses use company credit cards; but when investigators raided the firm’s offices they recovered 124 different debit and credit cards.
The court heard that between June 2015 and December 2017, they had purchased 47,000 tickets, using 127 names, 187 email addresses and 200 postal addresses.
Taylor Swift’s Wembley concert was one of the many tickets sold at an extortionate price
In business, there is a long tradition of goods being purchased at one price, and sold at another, but Ticket Queen’s practices (the now defunct company’s Facebook and Twitter feeds both display the name Ticket Queen rather than TQ Tickets) were far less transparent.
Primary ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster, See Tickets and the like often use an automated system to block multiple purchases and keep touting at bay, but team TQ circumvented this by various methods, including using specialist software to conceal their unique IP address, enabling them to hoover up tickets.
The tickets were then resold on the secondary marketplace — sites such as Viagogo, Seatwave, StubHub and GetMeIn — often at vastly inflated prices.
Sometimes tickets advertised to the unsuspecting public wouldn’t even exist at point of sale — a practice known as ‘spec selling’. Take, for instance, Ed Sheeran’s hotly-anticipated tour of 2018; the jury was shown evidence of TQ aliases selling tickets on Viagogo hours before promoters opened the actual sale in July 2017.
Once the sale did open, a massive shopping enterprise began, one worker boasting in messages of having 38 web browsers open at the same time in order to obtain as much stock as possible.
If tickets didn’t materialise, there was always the option of ‘doing a fraudie’, sending customers an empty, ripped envelope to imply the contents had been lost in transit, or using ‘fraud juice’ (Tipp-Ex correcting fluid) or more sophisticated methods to amend tickets.
While company accounts maintained a ‘veneer of legitimacy’ via the firm’s original enterprise in events travel; the reality was different. Staff revelled in the greedy scheme.
Messages between Douglas and his then wife were read out in court in which he wrote ‘f*** me. I’ve rinsed some tw*t on Via [Viagogo] today’. Lynda, who claimed she simply did some book-keeping for her sister, replied: ‘Not unusual though, is it?’
Another Skype message from Douglas to Chenery-Woods was even clearer. The purpose of the business, he said, was to, ‘simply rinse consumers for as much profit as they are willing to pay’.
In the village of Dickleburgh this week the goings on at TQ Tickets were still very much a topic of conversation. Sisters Maria and Lynda grew up in the village with its medieval church; Maria going on to work for her father’s coach business and Lynda working for pregnancy and parenting club Bounty as a secretary before the siblings began working together.
Another of the high-priced tickets sold was for the world-famous Cirque Du Soleil
Both sisters were described to us as ‘down to earth’, both raised families and were rooted in village life. What went wrong?
‘What made them do it was they were making good money,’ says a family friend. Not that outsiders knew just how good things were.
‘When Maria started the company, people knew she was making a killing, but they had no idea of the extent of it.’
Certainly both couples appear to have enjoyed life. ‘Maria idolised her kids, apart from that, she just wanted the good life — not the high life, just a good life, she liked her holidays, but wasn’t one to go out and buy exotic clothes.’
Woods, according to villagers, was the flashier half of the relationship. A ‘big-head’, says one, while another adds, more charitably, ‘You liked him, but he was full of himself, but then most salesmen are.’
Both Woods and Douglas, who has split from his wife since his arrest, are understood to own multiple properties in the UK and abroad. Douglas, who once worked as a mechanic and fitter in the Chenery coach business, advertises an apartment with swimming pool on the island of Ciovo, in Croatia for holiday rentals.
The two families enjoyed holidays to Croatia, while Chenery-Woods’ social media pages documents further travels as well as trips to the champagne bar at upmarket department store Harvey Nichols in London.
In the village, opinion is divided on what the family did.
Ken Bobbins, 77, who lives with wife Val in the manor house that neighbours the Chenery-Woods abode, says: ‘Some people in the village were quite angry and others were very sympathetic. It’s village life, people knew Maria and Mark and felt a bit let down.’
Last Night At The Proms is usually only on offer to people who have been to certain shows
As to his own feelings, he says: ‘Maria was always the first to help anybody if they were in a muddle and people have a lot of time for her. She just found a market she was good at. It evolved from working for her dad’s company and, as Mark said in court, it became an obsession, she would be up at midnight trying to obtain tickets and sell them.’
He is pragmatic about what his friends did.
‘I’m not saying their practices were 100 per cent. But I have bought tickets from them.
‘My wife and I go to concerts on a regular basis and you can’t get tickets, so what’s the alternative? You have to find someone who’s going to sell you a ticket.’
As to whether justice has been served, he says: ‘The essence is that these ticket promoters take the easy option. Whichever way you look at it, it’s not just Maria and Mark, it’s many, many other people doing it at exactly the same time.’
Next door, the Chenery-Woods, whose youngest son is just 16, await their fate. How much of their ill-gotten gains is left, will be the subject of a Proceeds of Crime Act hearing in future.
Mark Woods is both defensive and aggrieved. He swings from implying his wife was simply ‘entrepreneurial’ to conceding that lines were crossed, albeit she would not have crossed them (his words) if she had realised operations were illegal.
As for himself, he says he is ‘numb’ that his defence, that he was not part of the business, nor did he benefit from it, was not accepted.
‘Supporting it from a matrimonial perspective, that is what husbands and wives do for each other and that has been my undoing I am afraid.
The West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was one of many tickets sold
‘I have lived here since 1993, I bought my house before I met Maria, is that fair game? I have not benefited from any crime, it’s nuts.’
Listen to Mark, and you could be persuaded that tickets sold at vastly inflated prices do no harm.
‘Nobody ever forced anybody to buy anything,’ he says. ‘To the best of my knowledge nobody ever got hurt, to me it looks like a victimless crime, if you can categorise it as a crime. People like to quote a 500 per cent increase in sale price, but nobody wants to report on tickets bought under value. Plenty of people have, it would seem, benefited from the secondary ticket market.’
Try telling that to the masses of live music fans who have been ripped off at the hands of cynical touts like this unrepentant bunch.
Additional reporting: Chris Brooke and Stephanie Condron