An Atlanta-based ticket broker, who allegedly bought about $2 million worth of Vancouver Olympic tickets from an unnamed source on behalf of several large-volume resellers, apparently lost all the money, never received the tickets and is now believed to have been a “victim of fraud,” his attorney claims.
Details of the situation are not entirely clear, but TicketNews has learned that long-time ticket broker Gene Hammett, owner of Action Seating, allegedly paid the money to a foreign ticket source, and that source was going to use the money to purchase tickets from an unnamed Hong Kong company.
According to Gordon Berger, Hammett’s Atlanta-based lawyer, the foreign source claims a payment dispute has resulted in the Hong Kong company allegedly withholding the tickets, which they said they intend to sell on their own. After selling the tickets, the Hong Kong company supposedly said it plans to reimburse the foreign source.
Now dozens of Winter Olympics ticket orders by broker clients of Action Seating are likely to go unfulfilled.
Hammett supposedly contracted with the foreign source at least a year ago and was supposed to supply the tickets by the end of last month, according to Berger and insiders with knowledge of the situation. Instead, Berger sent out a letter dated January 29 to Action Seating’s customers explaining the debacle:
As you know, you ordered tickets from Action Seating for the 2010 Winter Olympics. My client contracted to obtain your tickets from a company representing that it was reputable, had authentic tickets and that it would deliver them to our client on or before the end of January 2010.
Within the past week, we learned that the tickets would not be forthcoming due to a failure by the ticket source to pay an alleged financing company in Hong Kong. According to the ticket source, the Hong Kong company refuses to release the tickets and instead has claimed a right to hold and sell them. We received a copy of a letter purporting to be from the financing company wherein it promises to reimburse the ticket source for the cost of the tickets after they are able to sell the tickets.
After further investigating, and being unable to confirm the identity and source of this Hong Kong company, we concluded that Action Seating may be a victim of fraud. So, in an effort to protect the interest of its customers and its substantial investment in this matter, we have contacted the appropriate authorities and have asked for an immediate investigation and assistance. Unfortunately, due to the nature of this transaction, Action Seating does not have the funds available to refund what you paid to it for the tickets. At this time, we cannot say whether Action Seating will recover any money it paid to purchase the tickets, but it will make every effort to reimburse each of its customers what they paid to Action Seating.
We truly regret any inconvenience that this may have caused you. We are working diligently with the authorities to prosecute the offending parties and to seek return of monies paid to the ticket source.
Berger did not return a message seeking comment. The exact number of broker customers affected by the alleged fraud is unknown, but the list supposedly includes some of the larger secondary ticket companies in the country.
Until this alleged incident, Hammett’s reputation within the broker community has been very good, but the busted deal has some scratching their heads. The situation has resulted in Action Seating recently taking down its Web site.
“He did a good job with tickets to the Beijing Olympics,” said one Midwest broker, who requested anonymity but has done business with Hammett and Action Seating in the past. “But clearly he got in over his head with this one. When dealing with international events, you can’t have just one source. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak.”
The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing experienced several problems with busted ticket orders, which led to lawsuits in the U.S. and Canada, and criminal investigations in the UK. The Vancouver games even created its own secondary Web site in an effort to help fans buy and resell tickets to next week’s Winter Games.
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what did eseats.com do? just curious
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/broker+shafts+Games+ticket+buyers/2520426/story.html
Were you at band camp?
I doubt it. I’m sure the 30 day dispute window is long gone for most purchasers. And even if the card companies did accept the claim there’s no money in the merchant account to “charge back.”
There was this one time I got a ticket for driving 6 miles per hour over the speed limit. That’s my best ticket story……
Yet another reason why brokers should not be able to sell tickets they don’t have yet. Even if they are honest, the might get defrauded themselves, and end up leaving the end customer stuck without money or tickets.
but welcome to the scalping game. Unless you go to the primary source, no matter how lucky you are, you’re gonna get burned eventually. Unknown and unnamed sources? He’s never going to see those funds again.
anyone who has purchased these tickets on a credit card can undoubtedly take this letter and send it to their credit card company and request (and receive a refund).
Its better to know now than to go to the event and have an issue which has happened to primary, secondary, venues and other businesses like hotels and airlines.
sittin in tahiti drinking a fruity cocktail
dont freeze your balls of in vancouver boys….lifes to short
yours truly ????????
Purchase WINTER Olympics tickets in Hong Kong?? And Hammett is an “experienced” broker? Maybe he can ask his uncle in Nigeria to send him a cheque.
Can’t you guys take a joke? Just kicking back on the beach ready to open a cold one.
Peace,
GH
I’m an Atlanta broker, do quite a bit of business and I have never heard of this guy. I also looked and in 3 years have never sent this guy a purchase order and he has never sent me one.
If you want to play the game of selling tickets not in hand and without seat locations then be prepared to pay back the customer when things go sour.
Eseats.com should step up and honor their commitment.
It is BS that they don’t have the money. They just don’t want to pay.
Pay up and then go after your supplier!
Eseats should lose their capacity to take credit cards if they don’t.
Happen to be watching my local news last night when an elderly couple was complaining about how they got duped by Eseats.com. The report also made certain to mention and show in writing from eseats, no refunds and do not call them. Bob will now change how we do business with you. You painted the broker negatively as a whole. I understand you getting duped… They are a lot of smucks out there!!!! But to tell the consumer, no refunds and do not call to inquire about your tickets, is BAD BUSINESS!!! BTW, Bob, you may want to read California law on ticket selling. You may be paying for more than the refund of their Olympic tickets.
I’m looking to interview someone who knows, or has done business with, Gene Hammett of Action Seating. I am a reporter with the Globe and Mail newspaper in Vancouver, Canada.
Mr. Hammett told some ticket holders that he was setting up an office in Vancouver and he was going to distribute tickets from there. But that never happened.
My email is [email protected]. Phone number is 604 631 6619.
We are wondering the same thing about 2010olympictickets.net… we purchased tickets and have been trying to get a hold of the company for days for a definitive answer of when the tickets will arrive. The company keeps changing their answer. Beware of 2010olympictickets.net and Global & Westend Tickets; that’s my experience at least.
Never heard of Gene Hammitt? I don’t want to be insulting, but you must be a newby. Some of us who have been around for many many years, as Gene has, know him. You may not be sharing the same website plug-in.
No matter. That is not the important thing. There are brokers who come and go, and I don’t hear of all of them, unless they “last”.
Bottom line is: you are taking a gamble always by selling tickets you do not have. I strongly believe that instead of outlawing “scalpers” or “resellers of tickets” (ordinary people do it now, and they keep claiming that they are “not scalpers…those nasty scalpers, I’m not one of them, but I still want $500 for my tickets”, LOL), even TicketMaster resells tickets on its own website as well as through the ticket-brokering company they recently purchased (TicketsNow), selling tickets you do not have is what should be outlawed. Currently, there are so many speculative ticket postings on all the websites (some brokers do nothing but that), that for some events they way-outnumber the few legitimate “in hand” ticket postings. A potential buyer gets totally confused seeing 20 listings (18 of them specs) and trying to figure out which one is the appropriately priced ticket to buy. I believe these spec postings often are intentionally posted in order to confuse the buyer and have the buyer purchase one of the 18 spec tickets, rather than one of the 2 legitimately held “in hand” tickets which usually are much more reasonably priced and for better seats.
That’s my take on all this. It should be illegal to take orders on tickets you do not have.
“Until this alleged incident, Hammett’s reputation within the broker community has been very good.”
Truly the laugh of my month, maybe year.
I know Gene well (it took me awhile to figure out what he is all about and have not spoken to him in years, he knows to avoid me) but he has pulled this crap over and over.
Gene did not buy any tickets from anyone, much less from Hong Kong, and he does not have $2 million dollars to invest in tickets. Well, unless he accumulated 2 million taking peoples money for this event in advance.
His business model is to get the orders (by taking them a little under market value) and if the ticket gets cheap and he can make money, he buys the tickets and fills the orders, if the ticket blows up and he will lose money, he leaves town and does his best to keep everyone’s money.
Think about it, he had the chance to take money for a few years now with the Olympics and other than suing him there is not much people can do that have sent him checks, charged cards or sent PayPal outside of the charge-back and stopping checks windows. Thousands of people could send him $5000 or less and just write it off as a lesson learned.
He has done this with UNC vs Duke basketball, NCAA Final 4, Masters, ACC Tournament and a few other events that, give me time to recall, I can tell you about.
I can only guess that the ticket brokers he has burned have kept their mouths shut due to embarrassment but I have spoken with clients he has burned on other events that literally wanted to find him and kill him.
I have warned the major ticket exchanges that brokers list and buy tickets from each other on for years telling them he should be banned and back balled from the industry but for unknown reasons they allow him to continue to list tickets for sale. I have kept saying its only time before it gets ugly again for our industry because of this guy.
If you are a broker and have been burned by this guy you should really raise hell with whatever exchange allowed him to list his tickets where you bought them.
I know nothing about this lawyer so I can only hope he is not in on the scam. Hopefully he is just believing what his client has to tell him but I would love to see what proof and documentation this lawyer has been provided from Gene about his Hong Kong source.
Mr. Lawyer, his name was Long Duk Dong, I met him when he fell out of a tree at a high school party back in 1984 in Shermer, Illinois, I did not keep a copy of the canceled check I sent him. I assumed he was good for the tickets.
The ticket broker industry really should have some kind of escrow company that the whole industry uses and advertises to the public for events taking place 90 days out from when a transaction takes place. Give the public and other brokers the option to go this route even if only as a public relations tool. You can never stop all the scams, people are just that ignorant and naive but our industry should be proactive in protecting the public from the scumbags. If not our industry will simply continue to die a slow death just leaving the scam artists such as Gene.
Love the 16 Candles reference. What’s happening hot stuff!
Sorry, but I work hard keeping my nose clean and providing my customers a valuable service. Sorry, I’m not involved in Hong Kong schemes to get Olympic tickets where I might have come into contact with this guy. I focus on local events mostly, and this guy (Hammett is how his name is spelled correctly) apparently has no inventory of Hawks, Thrashers, Braves, Falcons, etc tickets or I would have come into contact with him by now. I may not have been in the business for as long as some, but have been in it long enough to run into his company at some point if he were up to good.
Gene is not the only broker that plays this “business model” game. There are many “major” brokers (some of them Really Big-Time) that play this game:
“His business model is to get the orders (by taking them a little under market value) and if the ticket gets cheap and he can make money, he buys the tickets and fills the orders”. As a broker, I have been burnt several times by actually having tickets in hand, advertising them at “market price” or at the lowest market price, and losing a potential buyer to one of these spec scalpers who takes orders for less than market with no inventory in hand. Weeks later, the same scalper who took my potential customer, calls me (if I still have the tickets) and offers to pay me a much lower price, obviously to fill this order that he took without having tickets in hand. It can happen if I still have the tickets. One year I remember distinctly, we were selling Monday Masters tickets for $110 each (yes, a long time ago when they first started the practice rounds), and this “large broker” who did not have any practice round tickets in hand, decided to advertising heavily that he had them at $100 each and he was taking all the orders. Then, the week before the event, he started calling around and buying everyone’s tickets at $75 each. The buyers had all committed to him because of his undercutting our prices and advertising it heavily, without a single ticket in hand. We had not noticed until then that he was undercutting the price of our tickets, and getting all the buyers that way. We were forced to sell our tickets to him for $75 each. Annoying when we had gone through all the trouble of getting them in the first place, and all this broker did was play by this same “business model” game. So Gene is not the only one, I can list a long list of brokers who do that. That is when I learnt how sleazy this whole business can be.
I agree with the person who said there should be laws against selling tickets you do not have in hand. It would clean the landscape of all these spec guys, and leave it open only to people who work hard at actually putting their money down for tickets.
Does anyone know anything about Global & Westend Tickets (2010olympictickets.net)? I am totally new to buying tickets online, but they seem to be a bit…loose. They claim my tickets will be handed to me at the venue (in this case – at Cypress Mountain for the Men’s Halfpipe Olympic competition). Please tell me if I have been scammed!
Thanks
Olympic attendee
By the way, I suspect I need the tickets in hand when I board the bus to the venue, in Vancouver, since I purchased the bus tickets already through the VANOC.
Olympic attendee
Yes you need a bus ticket. If your broker didn’t know then he really isn’t much of a broker. Every ticketed event at Cypress needs a corresponding bus ticket. You can buy separately. I suspect that this broker is selling tickets he does not have in hand so you may not get the event ticket if he can’t source it out. I would threaten to phone your credit card company and cancel the order. Remember the credit cards require a signature on the transaction which obviously the broker doesn’t have. Demand the tickets a few days before the event or cancel. Once tickets are in hand get the bus ticket.
There is nothing wrong with the “shorting” business model as it is used for all sorts of Commodities as well as stocks and bonds. what is wrong is people doing it who are undercapitalized. That is a great suggestion regarding escrow for undelivered tickets. If you are well enough capitalized you can lay out the money and wait to be paid when the tickets are delivered. If you can not afford to do this, you can not afford to short the market. You should also be required to obtain a bond to compensate for the difference in market value and purchase price to the amount of 400 percent of the purchase price of shorted tickets. Shorting can be profitable, but also hazardous. One must have appropriate capital to do it. Downright fraud is a whole order matter which again can be dealt with by an escrow accoutn. BTW, Paypal already does this on orders until they are shipped.
That is simply called competiton and bringing the market into equillibrium. Perhaps you were overcharging at $100. So the short seller sells at $100 hoping the market goes down. If you believe him to be wrong raise the price of your tickets and he will have to buy from you at a higher price. if he is right, he buys from you at a lower price. You can bring your prices down lower and if he is wrong burn him later. This happens all the time and you make more.
The one problem is if someone brings the market down and does NOT fill because the market goes against them. That throws a market into disarray because it brought people into the event at a price to low for the market to support. Now you have panic and we have all seen that. There should be a short market just like in stocks, bonds and other commodities. All people should be bonded and the deposit money held in escrow.
To take this out because people who stock dont want competition is absurd. The only sleezy thing is if people dont fulfill there obligations.
(This comment was moderated because it was a duplicate of the one below)
He skipped town as the heavy weight brokers in town for the games are looking for him.
Come on fellow Brokers, if your going to post on this site, tell us who you
are and voice your opinion instead of hiding behind the computer screen.
I have always believed in life that if you give or express something why
not let people know who you are so we as readers of these post can look at
the validity of the person making the comments.
I hear what you are saying, but I am not sure I agree with you. This is not the stock market. In the case previously described, it so happened that we were the only broker that had tickets to that event. The broker that undercut our prices and took a majority of the orders, spent a lot of money advertising for tickets that they did not even have. When a potential buyer would contact us, then the other broker who was advertising their non-existent tickets, (as you know, people shop ticket prices when given the opportunity to do so, can’t shop prices on the stock-market), they always got the lower price from the other broker and would commit to them even though “delivery” was going to be closer to the event date. I don’t see an equivalent in the stock-market here. I am sorry but I find this rather sleezy. If everyone practiced this behavior, things would be in more of a mess than they already are, and TicketMaster will surely see all brokers go out of business, which is their goal anyway (you know that they already do their own “scalping” on the “Platinum Tickets” webpage, and their company TicketsNow).