Woman scammed buying tickets to Modesto show. Gallo Center CEO on how to avoid rip-offs
Kathy Marchant thought she was talking to someone at the Gallo Center for the Arts in January when she ordered tickets to see Patti LaBelle.
“He was very helpful,” she said of the person she spoke to about the tickets.
But it turns out she was talking to someone who not only had no affiliation to the Modesto venue but also had no tickets to sell her.
Still, she was charged $430.78 to her credit card for two tickets to the show she planned to see with a friend, Marchant said. The charges, according to an email she received about the transaction, included a delivery fee of $8.95 and a miscellaneous expense of $62.83 on top of the $179.50 she paid for each ticket.
Marchant, of Denair, said she received two other emails for the sale: an invoice with her credit card number and another with a pdf attachment that had a barcode to use to get into the theater for the March 22 show.
That last email is “where the whole mystery comes in,” Marchant said.
She’d checked a few minutes before she and her friend arrived at the Gallo Center and the barcode was there in her email.
But when they got to the venue for the show, the email with the barcode had disappeared, she said.
She checked through her various email boxes, including deleted items, trying to find it. “It was absolutely gone — gone,” she said.
So she flagged down Chad Hilligus, the chief executive officer at the center, and told him of her plight.
“I happened to be walking through the lobby and she stopped me, thinking I was an usher, as I was wearing a name badge,” Hilligus said in an email. “She handed me the printout from her email confirmation and it was immediately clear that it was from a third-party vendor.”
It’s an ongoing problem
Third-party online vendors sell tickets to shows at venues like the Gallo Center, charging higher prices than the actual costs, Hilligus said in an email interview. Some do have tickets to the shows, but others don’t, as in Marchant’s case.
“Typically, third-party vendors will send email confirmations following the transaction and then patrons will print out the email,” Hilligus said. “Hopefully with a barcode, and hopefully for an actual seat.”
But even those who get a seat likely have paid well over the actual cost.
“The concept of ticket scalping has been around since the 1800s, but the internet has certainly taken the practice to an entirely new level ...,” Hilligus said. “These sites often trick or confuse the buyer into thinking they are actually on an official authorized website, then overcharging for tickets and adding astronomical processing fees for tickets that may or may not actually exist.”
Marchant said she went online after reading about the LaBelle show in The Bee and thought she had typed in the correct web link for the Gallo Center before calling the number she found.
“They fooled me because I really thought I was talking to a (representative of the Gallo Center),” she said.
Gallo Center employees helpful
After talking to Hilligus the night of the show, she spoke to another employee who gave her a paper with steps to follow for people who have bought tickets through a fraudulent broker, she said.
And while Marchant was left without the seats she thought she’d bought, the ticket office was able to sell her two others in the balcony at $49 each, she said.
“The Gallo Center was very nice helping me out, they were so nice about it,” she said.
Her credit card had been charged for the transaction and there was a phone number on the statement for the vendor, she said. The day after the show, she called it and a woman answered.
Marchant said when she told the woman what had happened “she said, ‘There’s no way we could have deleted (the email)’ and she laughed and hung up on me.”
Marchant contacted her credit card company, which is researching her claim, she said.
The Gallo Center ticket office is the only authorized dealer for its shows, Hilligus said. When a show goes on sale, some third-party vendors go to the center’s website and buy as many tickets as they can. “Some even have multiple identities and credit cards so they don’t get flagged in our system.”
While Marchant paid $179.50 for each ticket, along with the added charges, the highest price charged by the center was $129 for the LaBelle show.
Hilligus said that last season, a Gallo Center board member overheard a person at a Johnny Mathis concert complaining about paying $350 per ticket and commenting on how “greedy” the Gallo Center had become. The top ticket price for Mathis was $159 through the ticket office.
Hilligus said “patron communication and public education is key” in the Gallo Center’s attempt to stem the problem.
“We do our best to include language on every e-blast and printed promotional piece that goes out to the public,” he said. “For shows that we know are going to be very popular, we typically put a purchase limit of eight tickets per order to help mitigate potential risk, and we also keep a fairly robust list of known offenders and decline those purchases.”
For people buying tickets, he has these suggestions:
Always make sure you are purchasing through www.galloarts.org or by calling the ticket office at 209-338-2100.
Note that the Gallo Center works to keep ticket prices affordable and that the top ticket price for the majority of its shows is $150.
“So if you see a ticket price significantly higher than that,” he said, “you are most likely not purchasing through the Gallo Center.”
As for Marchant, she still was able to enjoy LaBelle’s show.
“We were sitting by fun people and I tried to take my mind off it, but it was just so shocking,” she said. “But once she (LaBelle) came out, she was able to take my mind off of it.”
