The club are not defrauding season ticket holders. CPISA took up this subject with CPFC some time ago and showed them a long list of football ticket sites that had tickets for Palace matches available. The club did some work and warned some season ticket holders that if they sold their seats on ticket sites they could lose their season tickets and some now have for this season.
However some of these season tickets are known to be foreign owned so are more difficult to trace. There are even some tickets on some sites regularly available for sale in the away end!
However there are no Palace tickets for sale on Ticketmaster UK, they do not I believe sell any Premiership football tickets.
The club have have a high take up of memberships (International and Gold) therefore when tickets become available they are always in short supply.
CPISA will continue to question the club over ticketing, ticket windows and ticket allocations.
So you are saying that the club now has so many season ticket holders that want to purchase more tickets (for a game they are already going to) and Gold memberships that want to purchase tickets that most tickets have now been bought up by these additional people within 60 seconds of going on sale?
I don't believe this is the case and the club need to investigate - something is amiss as it looks like there is a script running somewhere (maybe external to ticketmaster or ticketmaster are involved) whereby all the seats are purchased automatically within seconds by an organisation (be it a corporate organisation or hospitality organisation) and then put on resale sites not connected to ticketmaster within minutes of being 'purchased' on ticketmaster. The reason people suspect ticketmaster may be involved is that tickets are 'lost' even though they are sitting in a persons basket waiting for payment confirmation. So only internal ticketmaster scripts can remove such a ticket and move it to another payer.
Palace may not be directly involved in any of this but 'defrauding' if they are involved as they are knowingly selling memberships to fans to buy tickets, that the fan will never be able to purchase.
This wasn't an issue before ticketmaster was involved - tickets were easy to come by even for the FA cup semi's and final - four tickets together - easy to purchase.
How is this affecting the fan base?
People give up trying to purchase tickets and drift away from the club. We used to go as a four (two kids, Mum and Dad) - not season ticket holders as Mrs sometimes works weekends and night games were not good for kids so gold memberships were the way for us. We haven't renewed this year as tickets became hard to buy towards the end of last season and I suspected something was strange was going on.
So last Saturday were watching a live stream of the game, 2-0 down and not such a great performance - weather was fine so I went to cut the grass - came back in when it was 1-2 (had it on the radio outside) and the kids had switched over to the Liverpool game as they said the Palace game was boring and Liverpool were losing 0-1 to Forest.
A match day experience is not just about the on pitch football but also about the community and I'm a believer in supporting your local club (even though I'm not originally from this area and Palace wasn't my first club) - It won't be long before these kids are lost to the club forever as they find other things to occupy their interest - once lost they won't return.
Palace used to be very community focussed but maybe changing to be not so anymore.
Hoovering up of tickets by corporate organisations might be only the start.