Miles Hart possessed a reputation for being able to procure virtually anything. Acquaintances from his elite private school recount an instance where he orchestrated a surprise, all-expenses-paid trip to Paris via private jet, with less than 24 hours’ notice.
Thus, when he began offering Glastonbury tickets, hospitality passes, and VIP Access All Areas passes – asserting privileged access due to family land near the festival site, or purported affiliations with an event company – many former schoolmates eagerly seized the opportunity.
Within a couple of years, his sales expanded globally, as he brokered deals to sell approximately £1 million worth of passes to individuals who had been unsuccessful in the annual rush for official tickets on the Glastonbury website.
However, as the 2024 festival approached, Hart’s promises of tickets dissolved into a mirage, constructed from falsified invoices and fabricated email addresses. Miles, now 27, subsequently absconded.
How did Miles Hart manage to perpetrate this scheme? The BBC has interviewed former friends to unravel the narrative of a brazen scammer who allegedly defrauded even the family of a deceased friend, and accumulated tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid debts to his godmother. He left behind a wake of devastation: debt, resentment, and threats.
Miles Hart was known as sociable, intelligent, and humorous – the group’s jester. This is the recollection of some former friends from Millfield School, an institution renowned for producing numerous Olympians and sporting figures, including Formula One driver Lando Norris.
The Somerset school, with fees of £12,000 per term, is located just a few miles from Glastonbury Festival’s iconic Pyramid Stage. “Everyone wanted to be there. Miles was someone who could get you in,” says Elle, who knew him since the age of 10.
Glastonbury Festival tickets are among the most coveted globally, typically selling out within minutes. The festival stipulates that only tickets purchased through its official vendor, See Tickets, are valid and linked to photo identification to deter touts.
However, anyone providing an alternative route to entry could command a premium price.
Elle recounts that Miles secured her a wristband for entry one year, and they attended the festival together. After leaving school, he commenced selling tickets.
Seb, another former Millfield student two years senior to Miles, says he purchased a ticket from him for the 2022 festival, the first since the COVID-19 pandemic.
He says Miles claimed to possess 42 hospitality tickets for sale, purportedly obtained because his family leased land for luxury campsites at the festival. “I thought it was like an exclusive opportunity and I really didn’t want to miss out,” Seb says.
However, two days before the festival, after pursuing Miles for months, Seb says he contacted Glastonbury Festival to verify the allocation of hospitality passes. The festival informed him that it had no record of Miles. Seb’s subsequent attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.
“I had heard anecdotally that he was partying in Paris and that made me feel incredibly bitter,” Seb says.
Elle’s close friend, Cian, had also provided Miles with funds for tickets that year and sought her assistance in recovering them. Subsequently, other mutual friends contacted Elle, stating they had also been defrauded.
Several months later, Cian passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack. Elle and another friend traveled to New Zealand for the funeral, where Cian’s family resides. Cian’s mother requested that Elle ask Miles to repay the £500 he owed, to assist with funeral expenses.
Miles dispatched a voice note stating the funds were already in transit. However, three years later, the family has received nothing.
In 2023, Miles resumed his activities, selling Glastonbury tickets to approximately 50 individuals without delivery. Kate, another of Miles’s former friends, says she was added to a WhatsApp group comprised of former school friends and acquaintances who claimed to have been scammed.
The group expanded to include more members of their social circle, Kate says. Some reported that Miles had borrowed money and failed to repay it, while one individual posted a receipt from a London nightclub with a staggering bill, stating: “Where’s your friend? He owes me £200k.”
Speculation arose regarding Miles’s ability to maintain his extravagant lifestyle; Kate and Elle questioned whether their surprise trip to Paris the previous year had been financed with “scammed money.”
“Everyone knows someone who knows someone who’s been scammed by him,” Elle says. “And all the whilst he was doing this, he was going on like really crazy bougie holidays and spending crazy amounts of money that probably wasn’t his.”
Elle says this is the moment when she decided she wanted to find out how far the lies had gone.
But Miles was about to pull off his biggest scam yet.
In the lead-up to Glastonbury 2024, some individuals who had missed out on the official sale were seeking tickets from two other sources: an Ibiza promoter named Kai Cant, who had posted an Instagram story asserting he could secure hospitality tickets for £1,350, and a company named Star Gaze Entertainment.
Both of them had, in turn, been promised the tickets by Miles Hart.
One of Kai’s customers, a DJ named Danny, was informed that Miles asserted he managed a catering firm operating in the hospitality areas at the festival, granting him access to tickets. Danny was also told that Miles claimed his mother, Susannah Hart, could obtain tickets through her connections as a local councilor, and that she was not someone who would jeopardize her reputation through involvement in anything dubious.
In reality, Somerset councilors do not have privileged access to Glastonbury Festival, and Susannah Hart had no involvement in Miles’s ticket schemes.
Will, an employee of Star Gaze during the summer, informed the BBC that he had sold tickets worth hundreds of thousands of pounds for the company, but he was unaware of their source.
In total, customers of Kai and Star Gaze spent almost £1m on Glastonbury tickets to be supplied by Miles Hart.
With weeks remaining, Will says the calls and emails to Star Gaze from people asking where their tickets were had become incessant. In group chats, Kai’s customers were also suspicious they had been ripped off.
“If this was all a big scam, would I be on the phone to you now?” Miles said in one voice note message to a panicked Kai.
Miles said he did not want to entrust the tickets to the postal system, so he arranged to meet Kai’s customers in hotels across England to hand them over personally. Will travelled to meet him at a pub in Glastonbury to pick up the Star Gaze customers’ tickets.
They waited for hours with no sign of Miles, in Glastonbury or at any of the hotel meet-ups. Customers could not reach him because he had always phoned them with his caller ID hidden.
Danny says his phone suddenly received a call from a hidden number and he knew it was Miles. “I’ve had problems with my phone,” Miles said to explain his silence. He said the tickets had fallen through because “Glastonbury have found out about them and shut the whole thing down”.
Miles was next seen in a clip on social media – with someone confronting him in the street and demanding his tickets or a full refund of £10,000 by the next day. “Yeah, I’ve agreed to that,” Miles is heard to say.
And then, he vanished again.
Elle wanted to understand the extent of Miles’s deception, so we travelled with her to meet his godmother, Annamaria.
Years earlier, when Miles’s mother Susannah was going through a divorce and was suffering financially with the mortgage and school fees, Annamaria had stepped in. She contributed to the school fees and took over the mortgage, intending to help the family renovate and sell their home.
She says that Susannah Hart ended up owing her £300,000 in total, but that Susannah had refused to sell the house or to resolve the financial issues. Three court cases and three appeals later, and Annamaria ended up owning the house. Susannah Hart did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.
When Annamaria put the house up for auction in 2023, to her surprise Miles was at the sale. He bid and won the house, giving a cheque of £90,000 for the deposit. But three days later, the cheque bounced.
She sold the house to someone else, but under the rules of auctions, Miles still owes her the money. “To this day, I don’t understand why he did it,” Annamaria says.
In the house clearance, Annamaria found a box file filled with documents. She showed it to Elle: it contained dozens of bank cards in different names – the names of Elle’s friends.
Elle spoke to her friends who said that, in the first year of university, Miles had asked several people if they wanted to make an easy £100. He told them he would sign them up for a bank account, send them the referral fee and cancel the card.
Criminologist and financial crime expert Dr Nicola Harding told Elle that instead of cancelling the cards, it appeared that Miles had made their friends into “money mules” – people whose bank accounts are used by scammers to quickly create a chain of transactions and make illicit cash harder to track.
“I can’t believe that he would, like, put those people – specifically that he was so close to – I just can’t believe he put them in that position,” Elle says.
Other people felt the fallout from Miles’s deceptions. Kai Cant went into hiding in Spain, saying on Instagram the scam had left him with debts of £500,000 and put his life at risk. And the new owner of Miles’s home told the BBC how he and his wife had been threatened after their address had been posted online.
Speaking anonymously, he said they had been visited by debt collectors, bailiffs, people owed money and, on one occasion, two “very large men” who appeared to want to “cause us physical harm”.
The new owner has now installed eight security cameras, automatic number plate recognition, facial recognition and a network of lasers to detect intruders. “It really is like Fort Knox,” he said.
So where is Miles now? The BBC obtained a covert recording of Miles meeting an unknown man, apparently on the pretext of carrying out a business deal.
In the recording, Miles says he is working for a client who has a “huge cash flow issue” and needs a loan. But Miles claims the client has assets worth almost a billion euros.
The man asks about Miles’s role and Miles admits he has “debt that needs to be paid”. “I was involved in something that went wrong,” he says.
Miles gives an account of how the festival ticket sale went wrong and says one group of customers are angry, but the rest are willing to wait for their money.
The other man then says: “What if I told you that I represent one of these groups? Some of the nastier groups. There’s a lot of people wanting blood.”
He warns Miles that the debt – £480,000 to the group the man says he represents – is not going away, and Miles promises to pay within 56 days. “I am an honest person,” Miles says.
That recording was made last summer, but the BBC understands Miles has not refunded anyone.
Kai Cant said he has paid back everyone who bought tickets through him. Star Gaze Entertainment has shut down and Benjamin Harris, the company boss, cannot be found.
The Metropolitan Police said it is investigating up to 50 allegations of ticket fraud relating to Glastonbury 2024.
Miles Hart was contacted for comment and said, through lawyers, that there were numerous “material errors” in the allegations made against him and that some of the people who spoke to the BBC “cannot be relied upon to represent an accurate portrayal of events”.
His whereabouts are unknown, and he was last spotted at a pub near Glastonbury, a few days before this year’s festival.
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