Get Gephardt: Ticketmaster seizes back purchased seats

Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes

STANSBURY PARK – Imagine buying tickets to a show, then having the seller refuse to give them to you.

That’s what happened to a Stansbury Park woman when she got a refund she didn’t ask for. Cammie Skogg bought four tickets to the upcoming Tyler Childers show at Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre.

A few weeks later, she got a notification from her credit card company that the merchant had credited her account. Ticketmaster had refunded the money paid for those seats and taken the tickets back.

“I was pretty upset,” Skogg said.

She said the company told her they canceled her order because its system indicated she had attempted to violate its “terms of use.” Skogg asked how she violated those terms.

“There’s nothing that they can tell me what we did to cause them to do this,” she said.

Skogg was mad the tickets were taken against her will, but worse – without an explanation. She was worried about what it could mean for future Ticketmaster ticket purchases.

“I really am nervous about, you know, can this happen again?” she told KSL. “Be transparent, you know, don’t tell me that I violated something that I didn’t violate.”

With nowhere else to turn, Skogg decided it was time to Get Gephardt.

The KSL Investigators reached out to Ticketmaster on Skogg’s behalf, not through customer service but through its public relations team. We didn’t hear back, but it seems someone got our message because the very next day, Skogg heard from them.

Ticketmaster resold her the seats and she said it also waived its customary fees. So how did this happen?

Ticketmaster told Skogg that the IP address she was using when she bought the seats was similar to the IP address of a bot – so its system rejected the purchase.

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Matt Gephardt has worked in television news for more than 20 years, and as a reporter since 2010. He is now a consumer investigative reporter for KSL TV. You can find Matt on Twitter at @KSLmatt or email him at matt@ksl.com.

Cimaron Neugebauer is an investigative journalist for KSL-TV.