When Mark Gallagher of Vancouver logged on to StubHub in February to buy tickets for the World Cup, he assumed he was buying from another fan who couldn’t make the match.
“It’s portrayed as a reliable, credible source of buying resale tickets off individuals who want to sell their tickets,” he told CBC News.
But a CBC investigation has found that while StubHub claims it is a “marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets,” the online ticket company is run by a mass scalper and helps bankroll other large-scale resellers who use the platform.
“I literally had no idea,” said Gallagher. “That doesn’t seem right to me.”
StubHub is reportedly the largest player in a resale industry where professional scalpers scoop up billions of dollars worth of tickets to mark up to resell at a profit.
StubHub’s business model — which is legal — moved $9.2 billion US in tickets in 2025 and has been under intense scrutiny as the company cancelled thousands of World Cup orders, prompting investigations by Consumer Protection BC and the Texas attorney general, as well as two proposed class-action lawsuits in the U.S.
Mark Gallagher tells CBC News about the frustration of being assured his World Cup tickets would land — only to arrive at B.C. Place in Vancouver empty-handed.
The company recently told CBC “StubHub does not own, possess, or sell tickets. We are a technology platform that connects independent buyers and sellers. (Think: eBay).”
However, in recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, StubHub CEO Eric Baker disclosed he not only runs the giant resale platform, but is also part owner and managing director of Andro Capital, a fund that sells millions of dollars worth of tickets on StubHub.
CBC asked Baker for an interview to discuss his companies — and the contradiction between mass scalping activities on StubHub and its marketing as a “marketplace for fans.”
Baker and StubHub declined repeated requests to speak to CBC.
“This information has been fully disclosed in StubHub’s public SEC filings, and we don’t have anything to add beyond what is in those filings,” a spokesperson wrote in an email earlier this week.
StubHub bankrolling scalpers ‘a revelation’
Those SEC filings also show that StubHub has struck a deal with an affiliate of Baker’s fund to bankroll other mass scalpers, to help them buy and post large quantities of tickets for resale on StubHub.
This all flies in the face of the company’s marketing image, says Randy Nichols.
“It’s just very deceiving. StubHub’s told the public they’re a marketplace, they want to be treated as a marketplace,” said Nichols, a band manager based in New York who has done extensive research into the ticketing industry on behalf of the National Independent Talent Organization.
“What they leave out is that their CEO is a large ticket seller.”
Jeff Ripley of Spokane, Wash., who got stiffed on game day after buying World Cup tickets on StubHub, told CBC News “that sounds like a conflict of interest.”
“I think most of us know that, yeah, there are mass scalpers out there,” said Ripley, who has since filed a dispute over his refund.
“But now to find out that StubHub is providing short-term financing for those mass scalpers to purchase tickets — that’s a revelation.”
Mass scalpers dominate resale tickets
Fans have witnessed a radical transformation in the online ticketing industry over the last two decades with the rise of websites like StubHub, Vivid Seats and SeatGeek.
Average concertgoers often find themselves beaten by tech-savvy resellers who harvest e-tickets from primary box offices to re-sell them on these sites.
Brokers and professional resellers prefer to characterize themselves as a “secondary ticket industry,’’ but extract billions of dollars in profit from fans, artists and venues each year by marking up prices, based on market finance research by Mordor Intelligence.
It’s a small number of corporations who are selling all the tickets on StubHub, driving up prices for everyday fans, Nichols said.
“I care about this because I’ve just watched artists that I work with for years have their fans screwed.”
An estimated 70 to 80 per cent of all tickets on global resale sites are controlled by mass scalpers, according to numerous industry reports, including a U.K. inquiry into StubHub in 2021.
That’s a statistical reality Dan Wall, executive vice-president for Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, acknowledged in a recent interview with CBC.
Ticketmaster, the world’s largest primary box office company, allows professional scalpers and fans to post tickets for resale on its website as part of its business model, though Wall acknowledges the practice is ultimately “exploitive.”
Entire interview with Ticketmaster/Live Nation senior executive Dan Wall, in which he addresses dynamic pricing and calls for the company’s breakup following U.S. anti-trust verdict.
But having to buy from large-scale scalpers is harming the fan experience, says business professor Christopher MacDonald.
“There seems to be a pretty wide consensus that it’s a problematic practice,” said MacDonald, a teacher of ethics and critical thinking in the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto’s Metropolitan University.
“It’s not so much just that you have some guy who got a hold of a cheap pair of Bruce Springsteen tickets and is going to sell them at a profit. I doubt very many people are going to feel too, too worried about that. But when it’s happening on an industrial scale, it really does seem to be — in important ways — interfering with the relationship between the artist on one hand and their audience on the other.”
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