Ticketmaster Class Action Lawsuit Alleges They Encourage Ticket Resellers
Ticketmaster has been sued for inflating prices of tickets to supposedly “sold out” events by cultivating a resale market for scalpers.
The class action lawsuit brought by Salvatore Vaccaro in Illinois claims that the company “apparently creates and distributes ‘doubledip bots’ to resellers to allow them to purchase or repost these tickets automatically which ultimately artificially inflates the prices to consumers.” Vaccaro says that Ticketmaster garners a fee on the first sale of the ticket using this system, but on the resale as well – generally on steeply marked up tickets.
The Ticketmaster class action lawsuit alleges that the company encourages resellers to purchase an excess of tickets to events and then to resell them at a steep price increase. Ticketmaster has its own secondary marketplace where the marked-up tickets can be sold to fans who weren’t “lucky” enough to grab them when they first went on sale.
Ticketmaster then pushes customers to the secondary market by creating fake “sold out” events.
The Ticketmaster class action lawsuit seeks to represent Illinois residents who purchased tickets from a secondary ticket exchange that originated from the Ticketmaster website from Sept. 26, 2015 until Sept. 26, 2018. Similar lawsuits could be brought in other states as well.
Conclusion
Keep an eye out for this lawsuit if you’re in Illinois. But we could see it in other states as well.
Ticketmaster has already been investigated by the New York Attorney General and the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC investigation lead to a $400 million settlement in 2014 over allegations of overcharging.
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