Ticketmaster. If there were a “Family Feud” question about companies you can’t find anything nice to say about, they’d probably be the top answer. Especially among the Swifties. The live event ticket retailer is in hot water with the Mexican government, thanks to allegedly overselling tickets.
Puerto Rican superstar rapper Bad Bunny was set to perform in Mexico City on December 9th. The venue, Estadio Azteca, has seating capacity of over 85,000 and was completely sold out. Imagine going to the venue with your Ticketmaster purchase, only to find out that you’re not allowed into the venue because your seat is already claimed. That should be impossible, right? So begins two separate stories of what happened.
According to Ticketmaster, a “large number of fraudulent tickets were sold” to people, which were presented at the venue, causing legitimate ticket holders to be left out. Maybe counterfeiters have gotten so good, they were able to make tickets that fooled the ushers, security, and the scanners. Or, as Mexico’s Procuraduría Federal del Consumidor (Office of the Federal Prosecutor for the Consumer) otherwise known as PROFECO attests, all the tickets were actually from Ticketmaster, and the retailer intentionally sold duplicate tickets.
This is one heck of an allegation to make. If Ticketmaster was intentionally selling more tickets than there are seats, then one could potentially make legal arguments that they violated certain consumer protection laws. Maybe you could argue that it’s like a hotel that overbooks itself, knowing that some people may not show up for a room, so you can effectively overbook and sell it twice. But that really doesn’t fly when it comes to assigned seats for a venue and the Mexican government wants to find out what happened. PROFECO is launching an inquiry into Ticketmaster to get to the bottom of this which could result in fines for the ticket seller.
This of course, comes off the heels of everything thats been happening with Ticketmaster’s massive bungling of tickets for the upcoming Taylor Swift tour and what its dynamic pricing format has done to Bruce Springsteen tickets for his upcoming tour. Between bots locking out people who had paid for pre-sale access to Swift seats and Springsteen tickets going for hundreds of dollars more than they’ve ever been in the past, Ticketmaster is not having a good end to 2022. While the inquiry into what happened with the Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City is ongoing, it’s hard to blame PROFECO for thinking Ticketmaster may have been doing something a bit duplicitous. Maybe this was just a genuine case of counterfeiting but it’s not like Ticketmaster’s legal history is squeaky clean either.
The recent incident with Taylor Swift tickets has brought back stories from the 1990’s where Pearl Jam made a complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice about Ticketmaster affecting their booking of shows because the band fought with the ticket seller about their fees and prices. Incidentally a separate class action lawsuit would later be filed against Ticketmaster in 2003 stating that the company did not disclose processing and shipping fees to buyers. They would later settle in 2015 and offered credits to people who purchased tickets from them from 1999 to 2013.
There’s also the case where Ticketmaster started enrolling people who bought tickets into a rewards program that charged $9.00 per month. They ended up having to pay over $20 million back on that one. Then there’s the allegations that the company worked behind the scenes to sell tickets directly to known resellers without offering them up for general sale. These resellers would then jack up the prices on the tickets, effectively acting as scalpers. This resulted in a ruling from the Canadian government that cost Ticketmaster Canada in the neighborhood of $3.5 million (USD). Now might be a good time to mention the company was also accused of hacking into the computer systems of competitor CrowdSurge, in order to steal trade secrets about their business.
Yeah. So. Ticketmaster.
