When I went to transfer them on Ticketmaster I noticed that the domain the email address was at for all of them appeared to be the names of businesses, but none of them had websites or any presence in google when I searched for them.
Being the curious person I am, I then went and looked up the WHOIS for the domain. They all were registered in the last six months, supposedly by Stubhub itself (nobody actually verifies the accuracy of WHOIS data though, its all an honor system)
It seems to me like there is probably a hustle going on, where someone is buying tickets under fake names and flipping them. Is this something Stubhub is known to do (SeatGeek pretty openly does it with their return program). Or is lying on the whois part of a larger scheme someone runs?
P.S.
If anyone is curious, the email domains were crimsonhillpartners.com , oneclassic.org , and ambercovecapital.com
Usually the format is <email prefix of buyer>@<stubhub controlled domain> and the tickets are forwarded pretty quickly. This way stubhub can actually validate you sent over a PDF + the contents of those PDFs or images if the buyer disputes delivery.
That's my best guess at least.
I didn't find much discussion about it, but one theory I saw was that for high-value tickets Stubhub will act as an intermediary to verify the tickets or prevent the buyer and seller from knowing who the other person is (because the original buyer info is typically on a ticket or revealed during the transfer, and the new buyer info is given to the seller).
I assume this is to cut down on scams and other issues related to claims of not receiving tickets.
If that's the case, why are they using cutouts for it? I'd think that if their purpose was legitimate, they wouldn't feel the need to disguise their identity.
A similar thing happened when Uber started in New York City. You needed a livery license to drive there, so they created dozens of livery companies (all with German names) that they registered the drivers to, as a way I think, to make it harder for the city to try to shut them down (the city didn't shut them down but I think that was part of their risk calculus). Lyft originally didn't register liveries for its drivers and was banned from New York until it spun that up and it delayed their entry into the market by a few weeks.
Wouldn't that tip off the fake seller if they saw the email?
Such things are such a game of whack a mole that I would approach it as invisibly as possible if I were trying to sniff out fake sellers on my site. Even if just to hope to keep them unaware.
The domains help Stubhub obscure that they are involved
If you don't want to lie on the Whois, use a shell company or something.
Further, the shell companies could be something Stubhub is doing to derisk the arbitrage portion of the transaction to isolate losses associated with inability to sell the tickets for a profit to the shell company rather than to Stubhub.
Stubhub was supposed to IPO in 2022, but it doesn't look like they did. This kind of 'gaming the numbers to pump valuation' doesn't seem implausible for a company that is trying to IPO.
Let's say there cut is 2%.
If I sell a ticket for $50 list price to StubHub and then they sell it for $50 list price then they got 1 dollar from me and one dollar from the eventual buyer. That's $2 total.
If I sell a ticket to someone else on Stubhub for $50 then they also get $1 from me and $1 from the seller. The "double dipping" doesnt work out even before you factor in the overhead.
This is not to say they aren't manipulating market. Maybe they think they can make more money because humans are risk adverse and sell tickets for less than they should to optimize EV, or somethikng.
In this case, StubHub could buy them and re-sell them to arbitrage the seller's price and the true market value.
In your second case, there was one sale at $50, meaning a $1 cut for the company.
Flipping for a profit ? Making StubHub look successful and be more active than it really is ?
There's no such thing as a ticker feed for the resale markets -- the market is characterized by "imperfect information". Artists and venues making it hard to buy and sell basically widens the spread for the secondaries to play with.
But why would StubHub avoid admitting they are doing that? SeatGeek just has you transfer the tickets to an email at their own domain (at least when you use the free returns feature).
Only thing I can think is they want to make it hard for the ticket seller to block them, but again SeatGeek doesn't seem concerned.
Further, the shell companies could be something Stubhub is doing to derisk the arbitrage portion of the transaction to isolate losses associated with inability to sell the tickets for a profit to the shell company rather than to Stubhub.
venues may cancel tickets or require photo ID if they suspect they were bought for resale.
My initial take would be that they would do this either:
a) to act as an intermediary (themselves) that you transfer to and then they transfer to the buyer's Ticketmaster account, so that you don't get someone's PII
b) they buy a few near face value to have when inevitably, fake tickets are sold and they have to replace them ASAP (which has happened to me before -- as in, I was at the venue and couldn't scan one of my tickets and then went in and called StubHub and they called me back and got a backup ticket for my friend)
But my gut tells me it is probably the first? This would also cut down on customers telling them they didn't get a ticket transfer (if they really did) and also ensuring that sellers actually transfer tickets. An easier method of all of this would be to have a way to work directly with Ticketmaster or AXS or whoever to act as an escrow agent for ticket sales, but considering AXS and Ticketmaster have their own resale services, I'm sure they make that as difficult as possible.
I have to think that the biggest ongoing costs to an operation like StubHub or Seatgeek or Vivid or any of the other marketplaces are fraud and customer service related to lost ticket transfers. So anything you could do to mitigate both of those (which acting as an intermediary would help with both) would be worth it.
Siderant: The thing that kills me about the resale/scalper nonsense is that in response, some venues are now doing anything they can to limit resales at all -- requiring you to pick up tickets from will call and show ID and credit card used to pay. So then you have to hope that whoever sold their extras on Craigslist or FB actually shows up at the venue so you can get your GA seat you paid way too much for, or else you're SOL. And like, look, I get it, you want to cut down on scalping. But things come up and people can't always attend shows. Or some of us will literally pay stupid prices to see someone live -- but when the venues put in onerous terms and check ID at the pickup window, that's just stupid.
If I’m selling my ticket on stubhub and I get a request to transfer the ticket to some stubhub.com email address, I feel more secure that it’s legit than a scammer.
None of the the domains listed in this thread appear to be taken (the site uses godaddy to verify, and is updated every 24h), but there are others in this scheme that may be related.
It’s basically an unregulated ticket stock market.
Buyer: Firstname Lastname
Email: mobiletransfertickets+12341234@gmail.com
They probably moved away from the single Gmail address for some reason, over to their own domain names they control? I don't think it necessarily implies they are buying your tickets, just that they are routing the transfers through them possibly for verification.
After all, processing PDF's and images of tickets forwarded from customers automatically and reliably is probably very hard.