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Everyone deserves a chance to fly, and if the tickets that theater patrons bought to hear those lyrics in Wicked turn out to be bogus, at least they should get a swift refund.
So argues a class action lawsuit filed Monday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, in which a Portland woman says the ticket resale marketplace StubHub still hasn’t refunded her for two counterfeit tickets to see Wicked at the Keller Auditorium last October.
Fake tickets are a common risk on ticket resale websites. At issue in the case of Amy Hoffman, however, is StubHub’s FanProtection money-back guarantee.
On Oct. 27, the lawsuit says, Amy Hoffman spent $446.79 on two tickets to see Wicked when the touring Broadway production visited Portland. When her family arrived at the Keller Auditorium for the Oct. 30 performance, Hoffman was told her tickets had already been scanned by other guests. She joined a line with what she says were at least 20 other guests waiting to file fraud complaints.
“This poor little girl in a pink dress was just bawling her eyes out,” Hoffman says of a young theater patron she saw in the fraud line as they waited with their families. “It seemed like nobody noticed her because they were dealing with the scenario. It broke my heart that this was her eyes to the world and how horrible it can be sometimes, and this could be her dream at that age.”
Since she and other family members had never seen Wicked, Hoffman purchased new tickets from Keller’s box office after waiting in another line, ultimately missing part of the first act.
“My cousin asked, how often does this happen?’ and [Keller management] said every show,” Hoffman says. “It’s been a bit of a—I don’t want to say ‘shit show,’ but that’s my lack of a better word.”
In her lawsuit, Hoffman says the tickets included a FanProtection Guarantee promising “valid tickets or your money back.” But Hoffman alleges she received neither valid tickets from StubHub nor her money back. She reached out to StubHub on Oct. 30, the lawsuit says, and for several subsequent months, and while she was promised a refund initially, she was told to set up a new PayPal account since the card she used couldn’t be refunded. Hoffman alleges that StubHub has given conflicting information to her credit card company, which has not been able to reverse the charges from StubHub.
StubHub did not respond to WW’s request for comment.
After filing a consumer complaint with the Oregon Department of Justice, Hoffman found Portland lawyer Michael Fuller.
“We said, let’s wait a little while and see if they give you your refund, but it became pretty clear after several weeks that that just wasn’t going to happen,” Fuller says.
Fuller says he found several instances in other states where StubHub customers complained about similar failures in the company’s FanProtection Guarantee to protect them from fraud. California’s justice department, for example, ordered an investigation into StubHub’s refund policies from 2020 amid the pandemic, which resulted in a $20 million settlement for that state’s consumers. Fuller says he would like to see Portland and the state of Oregon do more to take on companies who leave customers hanging.
“I think there’s an increase in online fraud, banking fraud, fraud of every type involving technology,” Fuller says. “We see from every angle companies less and less willing to work with the customer, assuming one of the other companies will take care of it.”
Fuller noted that one crucial factor in the case will be whether Hoffman waived her right to take collective action against StubHub when making her purchase, a move that many tech companies now weave into their terms of service (Hoffman says she did not waive her right).
Wicked was the first show that Hoffman used StubHub for, and while she says that she will be far more cautious of online purchases going forward—and purchasing event tickets directly from venues—she’s advised her cousin to double-check the tickets she bought through StubHub before the Wicked fiasco for the upcoming Book of Mormon production this spring.