San Diego’s Music Box Advocates for Senate Bill to Reduce Ticket Scams

Joe Rinaldi has been general manager of the Music Box San Diego in Little Italy for nearly a decade, but in the past year he’s received an influx of customer complaints about being sold fake tickets by third-party websites.

“It’s a near nightly occurrence that I get called to the front of the club I operate to face customers who have been sold fake tickets to my venue,” Rinaldi said. “It’s often couples on date night who have spent hundreds of dollars, and I do all I can to help them, but sometimes, I cannot.”

According to Rinaldi, the main way customers experience ticket fraud is when not directly purchasing tickets through the website but by typing the artist’s name into Google. Often, customers will be redirected to a fraudulent website, where tickets are overpriced, saddled with expensive and unnecessary fees, or, in some cases, not tickets to real seats at all.

“For example, sometimes it’s a $30 show, and they’re (third-party websites) charging $300. Other situations where the show is sold out, and more and more, people are enticed into looking for tickets outside of our framework, and fall into the same trap, and end up with no tickets,” Rinaldi said.

“They’ll get to our door, and we’ll scan the tickets, and they won’t scan. We’re forced to make hard customer decisions and have people waiting outside the venue. Sometimes we can’t make accommodations and we are forced to send people who have spent hundreds of dollars home.”

These ticketing scams are not unique to the Music Box or San Diego. In 2023, there were over 7,300 cases of ticket fraud in the U.S. and numbers have remained high, with incidents such as the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster scandal encouraging lawmakers to take action.

In California, one such initiative is Senate Bill 785 sponsored by the National Independent Venues Association California with the goal to prevent deceptive and predatory practices with regard to ticket resale. SB 785 will ban speculative ticketing, increase fines for bot usage, and outlaw deceptive URLs and fake ticketing websites. It will also require resellers to disclose original ticket prices, prohibit the duplicate resale of a single ticket, mandate that resellers clearly display they are a resale marketplace, and penalize them for misrepresenting ticket details.

Rinaldi encourages people to educate themselves on SB 785 and the representatives who support it.

“People should read the bill, learn what they’re representatives are doing, and know what goes into this bill,” Rinaldi said. “Representatives want to hear from you, and if you have questions or feedback, they are open to hearing that.”

Beyond protection, Rinaldi emphasizes that the best step individuals can take to protect themselves from ticketing scams is buying directly from the venue or artist website.

“If you don’t go through those two avenues, you start to carry risk in your transaction, and people need to know that,” Rinaldi said. “Go to the source. The people who don’t go to the source are often the ones that are getting victimized the most.”