Beware of Steelers Ticket Fraud
From this morning's Allentown Morning Call:"Julie C. Miller, who lived in Lehigh and Northampton counties, was charged March 30 with three counts of mail fraud for allegedly accepting payments for eBay auctions of Pittsburgh Steelers tickets, jewelry and rare coins, but never sending the merchandise."Ms. Miller used several different user ids to sell more than $51,000 in merchandise that was never delivered.
E-bay is an extremely popular venue to purchase Steelers tickets. With 23 NFL teams having waiting lists for season tickets, individual game tickets for the Steelers and other NFL teams are hard to come by anywhere except secondary markets like e-bay, StubHub and traditional ticket brokers.
Fans purchasing tickets to Steelers home and away game tickets on e-bay should remember that e-bay is primarily a community enforced marketplace. While the vast majority of transactions are honest, ticket buyers should consider the following tips to protect themselves from purchasing fraudulent tickets:
- Fans should take care to ensure that sellers have substantially positive e-bay feedback. Positive feedback of 98% or better is considered benchmark.
- Tickets purchased from sellers with lower feedback ratings, both in terns of the number and percentage of positives may be purchased for a lower prices because of the perceived greater risk.
- For additional peace of mind, buyers may want to check to ensure that some of that feedback was for previous ticket sales.
- Steelers fans in Pennsylvania may be at a disadvantage selling tickets on e-bay. The e-bay system is designed to enforce Pennsylvania State Law which limits the amount above face value that can be charged by Pennsylvania based sellers on the secondary market to 25% above the actual ticket cost.
posted by Sully at Thursday, May 11, 2006
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