Picture this. You love the Indigo Girls. Imagine your excitement, then, when you discover they’re playing at your favorite local venue, The Flynn, in Burlington. You click the first link and go to purchase tickets, only to discover an exorbitant $250 price tag. You love the Indigo Girls, but you also need to pay your mortgage, so you pass.
Then, you notice the website looks suspicious. It’s not The Flynn you’re buying from. It was a scam.
“Ladies and gentleman, that woman was me,” Susan Evans McClure, executive director of the Vermont Arts Council, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Friday. “I realized that if I, the director of the Vermont Arts Council, didn’t realize I was being faked by a fake website, who else was being harmed by this?”
McClure was there to testify on H.512, a bill that seeks to enhance consumer protections against predatory and scam ticket resellers.
Though lawmakers still need to hash out the details of the legislation, it appears to have broad bipartisan support for some of its possible concepts, like a 10% cap on resell ticket markups, banning deceptive URLs and preventing sites from selling tickets that don’t yet exist.
These practices that the bill would aim to guard against, though perhaps outlandish sounding, are already pervasive in Vermont, according to McClure and others. She pointed to the cost of tickets for UVM men’s soccer’s final game last season, which a reseller had posted online for almost 20-times face value.
Kevin Sweeney, director of marketing and sales at The Flynn, told the committee his team has identified more than 50 websites reselling tickets from Vermont events, 20 of which have only cropped up in the last year.
Scammers aren’t just costing consumers; they’re costing venues, according to Sweeney. Eventgoers frequently show up to The Flynn with tickets that were sold to multiple people by fraudulent vendors, he said. To preserve customer sentiment, The Flynn refunds the tickets, according to Sweeney, and he estimated that the fraud refunds and staff time cost the business about $50,000 annually.
“We don’t have 50,000 to spend on that. That’s a full-time person we could bring in to do programming we really want to do,” he said.
The bill currently exists only in short form, which means legislative attorneys need to work out the nitty-gritty. But the Vermont Attorney General’s Office endorsed the broad intent of the legislation Friday, and the committee looks poised to take it up in the weeks to come.
In the meantime, be careful out there.
— Ethan Weinstein
In the know
Senate Republicans declared their commitment to affordability and public safety at a press conference Friday, plus their concerns for Vermont’s dwindling revenue for roads and transportation.
It raises an interesting conundrum — how Republicans will juggle declining tax revenue, Vermonters’ desire for affordability and increasing needs in areas like infrastructure.
“We’re pretty firm: no new taxes, no new fees,” Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, said. “But I think we also can’t be so bullheaded to say that we’re not willing to consider tax reform.”
— Ethan Weinstein
Nearly our national bird
“The wild turkey has a special place in my heart as everybody knows,” Rep. Chris Pritchard, R-Pawlet, told the Vermont House Environment Committee while talking about the success of wild turkey restoration in West Pawlet. He said the birds were now in every town in the state of Vermont “for everybody to enjoy.”
— Austyn Gaffney
Shrine and dine
A shrine appeared Friday memorializing the Capitol cafeteria’s lost microwave. Or Michael Wave, as one missive labeled the machine.
Flowers, a heartfelt ode, some amateur graphic design — the gravesite could move even the most cynical lobbyist to tears. If not tears of sadness, at least tears borne of hunger.
I do take issue with the microwave being labeled “comrade.” Inquisitive minds recognize the machine as a tool of capitalist ghouls, whose obsession with productivity has turned the midday meal into something to be scarfed down under expedited duress.
— Ethan Weinstein
