A Toronto student who sold more than $18,000 worth of Taylor Swift “The Eras Tour” tickets on StubHub last year says he was awaiting payment more than two months after the sale.
Swift performed six sold-out shows at the Rogers Centre in November, and as it was one of the biggest tours and artists to hit Toronto in years, tickets for all six performances sold out fast on Ticketmaster. Swifties were in a panic to get a hold of tickets, so some buyers placed their tickets on resale platforms like StubHub and Vivid Seats (although fans had to pay through the nose — we saw tickets go as high as $29,000+ the day before Swift’s first concert on some platforms, although prices dropped a few hours before the show).
Toronto student and self-proclaimed Swiftie Mustafa Hamid bought four tickets to Swift’s concert at $365 a pop, for a total of $1,460. He told CTV News Toronto that he was originally going to attend the show with some friends but eventually decided to sell them for a profit.
“I was hoping to use that money to pay off student loans and help my family,” Hamid told CTV.
Hamid put his four tickets up on StubHub and they sold for $18,314 — more than $16,800 in profit. He said his payment was processed on Nov 29 and was told to wait five to eight business days to get his money. Unfortunately, two months passed, and he still hadn’t gotten paid — even after following up with StubHub “multiple times” and allegedly spending over ten hours on the phone with them.
After CTV’s Consumer Alert reached out to StubHub on Hamid’s behalf, a spokesperson told the news agency that the company initiated payment to Hamid within the allotted timeframe, but the initial payment failed due to the seller “needing to provide additional documentation”.
“However, our team failed to request the additional documentation that was needed from Mr. Hamid in order to process the payment,” the spokesperson said. “We have since reached out to Mr. Hamid to request the additional information which he has now provided, and the payment has been re-processed.”
In addition to paying Hamid his money, the company applied a voucher to his account, equalling 25% of the total sale ($4,578) due to the payment timeframe not meeting their standards. So, in the end, the Swiftie was reimbursed $22,892 (not bad for an initial investment of $1,460).
“It’s honestly such a relief to have the funds in my account,” Hamid said.
If anything, the incident has generated a ton of discussion about ticket re-sales.
“Resale needs to get capped at like 110% of [the] original cost,” one Reddit user noted. “The Taylor swift tour was proof [that] whatever we are doing right now isn’t working. Mobs of people [are] buying all the tickets they could with zero intent on going and every intent to inflate the price massively.”
