Squitieri & Fearon, LLP is investigating claims against key arenas and ticket sellers for violating consumer protection laws by charging improper excessive fees (such as service fees, processing fees or convenience fees) to consumers who bought tickets for concerts and sporting events. Venues and sellers like Ticketmaster regularly tacked on these fees that added more than 21 percent to the face value and dramatically increased the cost of a ticket.
On February 11, 2016 the New York Attorney General released a report stating that “Ticketing, to put it bluntly, is a fixed game,” Investigators found abuses and practices that prevent consumers from buying tickets at affordable prices or sometimes even getting them at all. The report also found that third-party brokers resold tickets on sites like StubHub and TicketsNow at average margins of 49 percent above face-value and sometimes more than 10 times the price. Some brokers used an illegal specialty software, called “ticket bots,” to quickly purchase as many tickets as possible for resale at significant markups. This software can order tickets thousands of times faster than a human can and those buyers then resell the tickets, driving up ticket prices.
If this happened to you, please contact Stephen J. Fearon, Jr. by e-mail at stephen@sfclasslaw.com or by phone at (212) 421-6492. You can also complete the following form, and someone from the firm will contact you.