Buyer beware: Third-Party Ticket Sellers

Imagine getting what you paid for…but moments later..learning you paid far too much for what you wanted.

That's what happened to one man in Palm Springs buying tickets to a concert at the McCallum theater online, and now he wants the community to know about his mistake.

When you google - McCallum Theater tickets - you run into two sponsored ad sites. Ticketsooonsale.com and ticketsales.com. These are ticket resellers that often will advertise and sell tickets at huge mark up compared to what you could've bought them for on the venues website.

"I think i've been gouged. i think i've been scalped."

For Freddie Bercovitz, his day began like any other average day.

"So what happened was online we were looking for tickets for an event in February at the McCallum Theater."

And after googling the event, Bercovitz clicked on the first returned result - ticketsales.com.

"We somehow found this other site, called ticket sales.com, and without realizing that we bought instead of the face value of $103 a ticket, they were $550 a ticket."

Bercovitz immediately called ticket sales dot com, trying to get his money back, but there's nothing he could do.

"We called them immediately within the first ten minutes of realizing we made an error like this, and they said, no refunds. you're welcome to try and resell the tickets if you think somebody else wants to buy them."

From customers - the frequent - frustration - the McCallum Theater is familiar.

"I called the McCallum. they said, oh yes, we do not deal with these people directly."

In a phone call with the McCallum Theater they explained they're just as big a victim in all this as the consumer. In fact, just last year they said they had an issue with Les Miserables where brokers bought up all the tickets in the hopes of turning them for big bucks, but but after not being able to sell them… the tried to return to the 30-thousand dollars worth of tickets.

Ticketsales.com and Ticketsonsale.com aren't doing anything illegal, but i did call to speak with their media representative and was unable to connect.

I can tell you they do plainly state their ticket sales are not connected with the venues themselves, and that prices reflect a resale price dictated by resellers.

For now, the best advice, we have is to call the venue directly or visit their website directly.