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TicketNetwork, Ticket Galaxy Settle With New York State Over Speculative Ticket Sales

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NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) — New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Wednesday that she has reached a settlement with several secondary market ticketing services and their owner Donald Vaccaro over the speculative ticket sales for passes they did not own.

According to a statement from Attorney General James’ office, TicketNetwork, Inc., Ticket Galaxy, and their owner Donald Vaccaro will pay $1.55 million and adopt reforms designed to protect ticket purchasers in the future.

The reforms include requirements to enhance disclosure for secondary sales including disclosing to consumers when they do not have possession of tickets and instead are offering to obtain them for consumers.

The companies are also prohibited from misrepresenting the reason why purchased tickets were never actually available in the first place — because the ticket reseller never had them in their possession.

New York State’s lawsuit centered on the sale of “speculative tickets” which were offered on the service by resellers who did not actually own the tickets. Once a secondary market purchaser bought the tickets, the reseller would then attempt to obtain the ticket to complete the transaction. Often, tickets were listed for events even before the tickets were available from primary market sources, the AG’s office said.

The Attorney General’s office alleged that in some cases, ticket resellers were unable to obtain tickets that they had sold and claimed the ticket resellers “routinely misled customers in cases where they could not ultimately provide a ticket, in an effort to avoid revealing that they never had those tickets in the first place.”

The AG’s office also claimed that tickets were often resold at “vastly inflated prices, while others did not receive the seats that were advertised. In some cases, consumers received no tickets at all.”

The defendants in the suit did not admit to any liability in the settlement.

The settlement is subject to court approval.


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