Super Bowl Ticket Seller Hit With Class Action After Failing to Deliver Tickets

A Super Bowl ticket selling website was hit with a class action lawsuit in response to the lack of tickets available for the most recent Super Bowl in Arizona between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks.

A group of plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against SBTickets.com after the ticket seller allegedly did not deliver customers the tickets to Super Bowl XLIX, which they had already purchased.

According to ESPN, it turned out that a lot of the ticket sellers didn’t have the tickets to begin with, which is part of a common practice called short selling.

Ticket sellers typically purchase the tickets for such events closer to the date of the event because they are cheaper, and it allows them to make a bigger profit.

According to one of the attorneys who filed the class action lawsuit, “we filed the lawsuit because our clients were scammed out of their dream to attend the Super Bowl and incurred thousands of dollars in expenses as a result.”

When SBTickets.com sold the Super Bowl tickets to their customers, they were told that the tickets were guaranteed, the Super Bowl tickets class action lawsuit explained. However, it was later revealed by SBTickets’ owner Paul Jones that he didn’t even have the tickets he was selling in his possession.

SBTickets.com wasn’t the only website that allegedly cheated its customers out of tickets they thought they had purchased. The ticket selling websites SeatGeek, StubHub and Ludus Tours experienced a similar problem.

The ticket sellers either opted to sell the tickets at a loss or offered refunds. StubHub reportedly lost millions of dollars by opting to sell the tickets at a loss. StubHub, which is a one-stop shop for others to sell tickets to a variety of events, reportedly told its customers that if a seller failed to provide the tickets they purchased, the company would step up and give customers replacement tickets. This reportedly happened in hundreds of cases.

According to the Super Bowl tickets class action lawsuit, SBTickets.com sent out emails hours before the game began saying that the tickets would be available.

Plaintiff Brandon Redwood traveled to Arizona from his home in Perth, Australia to attend the Super Bowl on Feb. 1 and had purchased the tickets to the game from SBTickets.com, paying $4,000 for two tickets. However, SBTickets reportedly never fulfilled his order, and he was never able to attend the game.

While SBTickets.com allegedly offered a refund to customers, whose tickets were not fulfilled, it was not as high of a refund offered by other ticket sellers. However, the ticket seller did offer a discount on future orders for customers.

The attorney representing the plaintiffs said that while the current Super Bowl ticket class action lawsuit is for anyone who purchased Super Bowl tickets from SBTickets.com that were not fulfilled that he is also interested in incorporating customers who purchased tickets from other ticket sellers that were never received.