They’re not shaking this off.
A group of 25 incensed Taylor Swift fans from across the country are suing Ticketmaster for fraud and intentional misrepresentation after last month’s Eras tour debacle, The Post can confirm.
The 33-page lawsuit was filed Friday in Los Angeles, attorney Jennifer Kinder told The Post.
Ticketmaster canceled last month’s general public sale of Swift tour tickets after seeing “historically unprecedented” demand at its presale events. Swifties reported website outages and hours-long waits — only to log off empty-handed.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti vowed to investigate Ticketmaster after his office was flooded with messages from irate concert hopefuls. And the U.S. Senate subcommittee that handles antitrust and consumer rights matters revealed it plans to hold a hearing to discuss concerns about Ticketmaster in the wake of the Eras errors.
The mega ticket marketplace has apologized — but it’s not enough for these diehard Swifties, who are claiming Ticketmaster “purposefully misled” presale ticketbuyers when it “could not satisfy ticket demand.”
The Post reached out to Ticketmaster for comment on the lawsuit. Ticketmaster’s parent company is Live Nation.
Taylor Swift performs at Wembley Stadium on June 22, 2018.Joel C Ryan/Invision/APIn a previous statement, Ticketmaster said more than 3.5 million people pre-registered for verified fan, the largest registration in the company’s history. Some 1.5 million fans were given a promo code for the verified fan presale, with the other 2 million placed on a waiting list.
Greg Maffei — CEO of Liberty Media, which owns a majority stake of Live Nation — told CNBC that 14 million people and bots ended up flocking to the site.
In their suit, Swifties claim Ticketmaster “tacitly encourages” scalpers because the company gets paid fees every time tickets are resold.
Leading the charge is Utah interior designer Julie Barfuss, who tweeted last month that she spent more than nine hours on the SeatGeek site attempting to buy Swift tickets. SeatGeek handled primary ticketing for a few stadiums.
Barfuss said she also tried the following day for the Capital One presale event, “only to have my card declined because SeatGeek had charged over 40 transactions totaling $14,286.70 the day before. No tickets and a card I can’t use.”
Taylor Swift performs during the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball concert at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 13, 2019.REUTERSOn Instagram Friday, she posted news of the lawsuit filing with the caption: “Look What You Made Me Do.” In a message to The Post, Barfuss explained her participation in the suit.
“I feel like Ticketmaster completely screwed up on this one. I did everything the way they asked. I was a verified fan. I had Loverfest tickets (which supposedly boosted me). I had a boost email from TaylorNation,” she wrote.
“I followed their instructions, logged on early, using my laptop (not a mobile device), waiting a LONG time (like everyone else), finally got ‘in’ and it was a bloodbath.”
She continued: “Grab tickets as fast as I could, go to purchase them only to be told someone else got them first, FINALLY got tickets in my cart, only to have the site crash, got thrown back in the queue, could not get a transaction to go through.”
The Swifties are seeking $2,500 for each civil violation.
Eras will be Swift’s first tour since 2018, in honor of her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” which dropped in October. The tour is set to kick off in Arizona in March and wrap up in Los Angeles in August.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this time of demand and we were assured they could,” Swift said of the ticket fiasco.
“It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
