Stubhub Inc., a reseller company, scammed me last year when I purchased VIP tickets to see the US Open Men’s final. It took sweat and tears, but I was able to get every penny back. Here’s how I did it:

The Scam

I purchased two VIP tickets to see US Open Men’s final for around $400 dollars each. A few days later, I received an email from Stubhub saying that, unfortunately, the original seller couldn’t deliver the tickets, but that, lucky for me! they had been able to find comparable tickets.

Their email included:

• a summary of the new tickets: VIP tickets to US mens final in Ashe Stadium, for the same price.
• a link to accept the tickets.

After clicking the link, a page opened up displaying the promised tickets, and I accepted them.

A few days before the game I discovered that the tickets I received were not VIP but General Admission: not only their real value was $32, but they also didn’t even grant access to the stadium where the game took place.

Getting my money back

Step 1: Call customer service

I’ll be upfront: you are not going to get any resolutions from this call. Nevertheless, you still need to make it. Only after they have informed you that there’s nothing they can do can you escalate your case, which brings me to the next step.

Step 2: Reach out to a non-profit bureau

I reached out to Better Business Bureau. You fill out the form explaining the incident, and they will contact the company on your behalf. In my case, the next day, I had half of my money back in my bank account. They claimed they couldn’t issue a full refund because I had accepted the tickets. This wasn’t good enough for me, so I proceeded with the third step.

Step 3: Send a Formal Notice

The formal notice serves as an ultimatum. It’s a letter that must be sent by registered mail (which costs approximately $30), where you essentially inform them that if they don’t refund your money within X number of days, you will take legal action. I used Stubhub’s template, although most courts have downloadable templates available.

A couple of weeks after they received the letter, I received a call from their legal department. Their response was the same as before: they claimed that they had already provided half of the refund and couldn’t provide the other half because I had accepted the tickets. This led me to the next step:

Step 4: Filing a Small Claim in court.

This step required a bit more investigation, but I will summarize it here for you.

First of all, it is strongly recommended that you first send a formal notice before opening a small claims case.

Go to the government’s court site for the state in which you live (or where the incident happened). For example, for California, you would visit this site.

Whatever state you live in, make sure that the link includes .gov at the end (at least in most countries). Follow the steps to file a small claim. Usually, you will have to fill out a form explaining what has happened and what you are claiming, and provide a description of the documents that will support your case. The cost for filing a small claim is around $100, and you should add those fees to the amount you are claiming (together with any other fees incurred).

Include all relevant documentation. In my case I included the following:

• Bank statement showing the amount charged
• Stubhub’s replacement tickets email stating details of offered tickets (In my case stating that they were VIP and granted access to Ashe Stadium)
• Screenshot of the actual tickets received (In my case General Admission tickets)
• Screenshot of the same tickets advertised in Ticketmaster for $32
• Copy of the formal notice sent to Stubhub
• Proof that formal notice was received (such as an email they sent you after receiving the formal notice, or simply a screenshot of the postage tracking status indicating delivery.)

Note that if the amount requested exceeds a certain limit, your case won’t fall under a small claim category. (I think the limit is around $15,000 in most cases).

What’s next

Once they receive the formal notice, a few things can happen:

1. Best Case scenario (and most common one): They receive notice of the small claim, they want to avoid legal implications so they give you your money back.
2. Second Best case scenario: They don’t give you your money back but they are open to negotiation.
3. Worst case scenario: They don’t give you your money back, they aren’t open to negotiation, and they want to go straight to court. This is very unlikely because it’s much cheaper for them to simply pay you back what they owe you, and they know they could face serious legal accusations otherwise.

In my case, it was scenario #1. A few months after filing the small claim, I received an email from Stubhub’s legal department stating that they had refunded the money to my account, including all the fees I had incurred for filing the claim. I checked my account, and the money was there.

Lessons learnt

1. Don’t take no for an answer. Before I was able to get my money back, I received a lot of “no’s” (customer service, BBB, formal notice …)
2. If they give you some incentive right away (like with BBB), chances are that you have the upper hand, so keep pushing.
3. Triple-check everything before accepting any tickets.
4. Or simply don’t use Stubhub 😉

Hope you found this helpful, and good luck! I would love to hear similar stories in the comment section and/or answer your questions.