College Sports

The NCAA and Ticketmaster are being sued in both California and Indiana as part of a class action lawsuit that claims the two organizations are violating racketeering laws when they force purchasers to pay a non-refundable fee to take part in a lottery for the right to purchase tickets to high-profile sports events.

Ticketmaster, based in California, and the NCAA, based in Indiana, are located in states where lotteries are illegal unless run by the state or for charitable purposes.

According to the lawsuit, fans who want to purchase tickets to the NCAA tournament must pre-pay the ticket price for the games, along with a $10 service fee. If the purchaser wins the tickets, the NCAA releases the seats, but if the purchaser doesn’t win, then they are refunded the price of the tickets, but not the $10 fee.

People can apply for Final Four tickets up to 10 times, but can only win once. The NCAA charges a $6 handling fee for each entry, along with full payment. Applicants can only win once, so if one enters 10 times and wins once, they still are not refunded the fee from the other nine entries.

The lawsuit goes on to say that the NCAA and Ticketmaster have held the money for as long as five months before refunding the losing lottery bids.

Most recently, the NCAA received an estimated 100,000 entries for the Final Four in San Antonio, but only distributed 4,600 tickets.

Wow, that’s a mouthful!

I’m not sure how I come down on this one. OK, on the part about not refunding the money right away, big time wrong. I guess the bigwigs are pocketing the interest for a few months before sending out the refunds, but that is wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s a lot of gas money!

But it seems like a handling fee would be necessary. Even if you don’t win, the applications have to be processed. These things don’t run themselves, do they? Salaries have to be paid, electricity to run computers, etc.

So I think this may be a whole lot of junk about nothing… But be sure that the cost of defending the lawsuit will be added to your ticket prices in the near future!

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