I know reselling tickets on StubHub can be controversial, but I primarily use it as a means to meet spending requirements to get credit card sign-up bonuses. Once in awhile, I’ll score some great seats and end up making a bit of cash (this is where the “controversial” part comes in…). Anyway, earlier this year I scored two tickets to Billy Joel at Fenway Park. The tickets were on the field in the section closest to the stage. I sold them almost immediately and made a decent profit.
A few weeks after shipping the tickets via UPS and getting paid, I got a call from StubHub asking if there was any way for me to get replacement tickets since the buyer had mistakenly thrown the tickets away with the UPS envelope. I felt terrible since I knew the buyer paid a lot for the tickets. However, I remember seeing on the envelope that the tickets came in that Fenway Park will not reissue any tickets under any circumstances. I felt bad, but there wasn’t much I could do.
My sister also had two tickets to this show that she sold through StubHub. After mailing them, she too got a call from StubHub saying the buyer had lost the tickets and asking if she could get them reprinted. After hearing about this similar phone call, I became suspicious.
What are the odds that two buyers for the same Billy Joel concert lost their StubHub tickets? It could purely be a coincidence, and in that case, I feel really bad that people paid a lot of money and may or may not have gotten their tickets replaced by StubHub. However, the conspiracy theorist in me immediately jumped to “this is a scam!”. I’m not familiar with StubHub protection from the buyers’ side, but if they do in fact replace the tickets with another pair, this is an easy way for a buyer to get four tickets for the price of two. I had an extra pair of tickets so if I really wanted to investigate, I could have checked the “lost” ticket seats to see if anyone was using them. However, having seen Billy Joel the past two years at Fenway, I got lazy and sold the tickets. Thus, the Billy Joel Incident of 2017 remains a mystery to this day…
Anyone have any experience with this or am I being crazy?
