Football fan slapped with £200 fine after paying man in high-vis jackets £10 to park in Old Trafford

A football supporter who was hit with a £200 fine after falling victim to a parking 'scam' near Old Trafford has issued a warning. Arsenal fan Lewis Roper, 27, went to watch his team take on Manchester United in their Premier League clash in December.

After driving to Manchester from his hometown of Hull with his brother for the night match, and first visit to Old Trafford, Lewis says he was waved onto a car park in Talbot Road, around a mile from the stadium, by a man wearing a hi-vis jacket.

READ MORE:

Believing the small patch of concrete in between two blocks of flats to be an unofficial matchday car park, and that man was its attendant, he paid him £10 in cash to park before heading off to the match. However, Lewis, a DJ who works for a housing association, was left gobsmacked when he returned to his Volkswagen Scirocco later that night to find he had been slapped with a £100 parking ticket.

The car park in fact belongs to Talbot Court, a housing block run by Trafford Housing Trust, where parking is resident's only and you require a permit. And he had been issued with a Parking Charge Notice (PCN) by a firm called All Parking Services UK Ltd, who patrol the car park on behalf of the housing trust.

Lewis told the Manchester Evening News : "I've done it loads of times before where you park at an unofficial car park near the ground. So I didn't think anything of it.

"But then when I came back there was a ticket on the windscreen. I just thought 'ey, what's all this about.' There was about 10 of us who'd parked there, mostly Arsenal fans, and we'd all got a ticket. None of us could believe it really."

The housing trust say the two men were not in any way affiliated to themselves or the parking firm and that Lewis