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The view from the Grandstand at Yankee Stadium.

Fans Cry “Foul” as Yankees Ban Print-at-Home Tickets

The Yankees have announced that to implement technological advances they would commence the availability of mobile ticketing for the 2016 baseball season. But they added: Print-at-home paper tickets (PDFs) are being discontinued so as to further combat fraud and counterfeiting of tickets associated with [those] PDFs. But many think that the real reason the Yankees are eliminating print-at-home tickets is to squelch StubHub and similar companies who sell Yankee tickets on line, so that those business s customers can be poached by The Yankees Ticket Exchange, where the Ball Club makes profit on each and every resale in addition to the initial sale of the tickets.

It s a dirty business. When StubHub sued rival Ticketmaster last year, the lawsuit was characterized as the largest ticket seller in America suing the largest ticket reseller, with journalists noting that neither was particularly beloved by fans. By then a subsidiary of EBay, StubHub was and is popular among brokers who flash-buy tickets at a retail-price and add a hefty markup. Ticketmaster itself stands notorious for a gaggle of confusing charges and fees attributed to processing and such.

A few weeks ago New York State Attorney General Schneiderman announced that investigators had found abuse of consumers all over the Ticket Industries for every kind of live entertainment, including sports, music, theatre and others. The A.G. s Multi-Year investigation found that more than half of all tickets to concerts and other events are reserved for Pre-Sale Customers and event insiders Before tickets go on sale to the public Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman released the results of a wide-ranging investigation into the concert and sports ticket industry that uncovered practices and abuses preventing customers from accessing tickets affordably, or at all.

The report on the investigation, entitled Obstructed View: What’s Blocking New Yorkers from Getting Tickets, outlines the troubling practices and names the middle-men in an industry that, for too long, has managed to stand between ordinary people and reasonably priced event tickets. Ticketing is a fixed game, Attorney General Schneiderman said. My office will continue to crack down on those who break our laws, prey on ordinary consumers, and deny New Yorkers affordable access to the concerts and sporting events they love. This investigation is just the beginning of our efforts to create a level playing field in the ticket industry. Some pre-sale events were made available to groups such as those who carry membership for certain bank or credit cards. More than half of event tickets are reserved for insiders, with insider holds 16 percent and pre-sales at 38%.

The investigation revealed that Ticketmaster and other third parties routinely add at least 21 percent to the face price of tickets and sometimes double the price.

Also revealed: brokers resell tickets on StubHub and similar sites at nearly 50 percent above face-value, and occasionally egregious markups of several times the original price. With the use of illegal specialty software called ticket bots, would-be resellers take advantage of the internet purchase system to acquire vast numbers of tickets that brokers resell at huge profits. Tickets for a June, 2015 U2 Concert at Madison Square Garden went on sale six months before the show. Investigators learned that the previous December one individual deployed the illegal bot software to buy more than a thousand seats before the first minute of the sale was over. Authorities have confirmed that hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of tickets are being acquired using illegal software. Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz is Chair of the Assembly Committee on Consumer Affairs & Protection. He said The revelation that the concert and sport ticket industry is unfair is nothing new, however discovering how deep it goes is certainly unsettling, This unscrupulous system is detrimental to the thousands of fans out there who are just trying to see their favorite show or sports team. Ticket vendors charging substantial fees, or withholding tickets to distribute to industry insiders have created a system that is decidedly unfair to the general public. Moreover, the existing system has also enabled a select few to buy tickets in bulk to Broadway shows like Hamilton, or big concerts like Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, only to sell them on the secondary market at outrageous markups these people are nothing short of vultures. I applaud the Attorney General for conducting this investigation.

Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz is Chair of the Assembly Committee on Consumer Affairs & Protection. He said “The revelation that the concert and sport ticket industry is unfair is nothing new, however discovering how deep it goes is certainly unsettling,” “This unscrupulous system is detrimental to the thousands of fans out there who are just trying to see their favorite show or sports team. Ticket vendors charging substantial fees, or withholding tickets to distribute to industry insiders have created a system that is decidedly unfair to the general public. Moreover, the existing system has also enabled a select few to buy tickets in bulk to Broadway shows like ‘Hamilton,’ or big concerts like Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, only to sell them on the secondary market at outrageous markups – these people are nothing short of vultures. I applaud the Attorney General for conducting this investigation.”

AE Oirich

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