Today, Sports Fans Coalition testified before the Economic Matters Committee in the Maryland House of Delegates.

We testified alongside other advocates in support of House Bill 740 which would protect consumers from online ticket fraud by companies that use deceptive URLs to fool consumers into believing they are a licensed or official vendor. We've talked at length about these dangerous white label ticket sites before. You may recall third-party resellers will pretend to be official vendors and then will charge you exorbitant additional fees, adding hundreds of dollars to your ticket. 

Brian Hess, Executive Director, spoke and submitted written testimony. In it he recounts several findings from an investigation we conducting last summer:

"In July of 2017, Sports Fans Coalition investigated this practice. What we discovered was more rampant fraud than what we had initially believed. To uncover the widespread fraud being committed on American sports fans, we Googled "Wrigley Field Tickets" into a browser in "incognito mode" with a cleared cache and cookies. Four of the top five results were deceptive URLs… Organic searches yield just as many deceptive results. All five of the top results for "Fenway Box Office" were white label sites."

Many fans are unaware they are being duped and HB 740 will go along way to protecting them. 

Read the full testimony here.