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If you’ve ever refreshed a StubHub page at 12:01 a.m. only to watch $80 stadium nosebleeds morph into $400 “premium” seats before your eyes, you already suspected the ticket reselling game was deeply rigged.
Turns out you weren’t being paranoid about algorithmic pricing. Evidence points to the ticket reselling game being *even more* rigged than originally thought.
Ask Mark Gallagher. The Vancouver dad logged onto StubHub last February to buy World Cup tickets, figuring he was buying from some 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. Then he arrived in Vancouver empty-handed, his tickets vanishing into the ether despite StubHub’s repeated assurances. “I literally had no idea,” he said. “That doesn’t seem right to me.”
It isn’t. And now we know why.
A blockbuster CBC News investigation, reported by Dave Seglins, Kathleen Coughlin, and Ariel Tozman and published on July 10, lays out a conflict of interest so blatant it’s almost impressive StubHub kept it buried in SEC paperwork this long.
StubHub bills itself as a neutral “marketplace for fans to buy and sell tickets,” the eBay of the concert world, just connecting Grandma who can’t make Springsteen with the guy who desperately wants to go. But per CBC’s digging through fresh SEC filings, StubHub’s own CEO, Eric Baker, is also part owner and managing director of Andro Capital, a fund that has been reselling millions of dollars’ worth of tickets on StubHub since 2008. That’s the guy running the platform, also running a shop that profits off it.
In other words, the house has a seat at the ticket-reselling table, too.
It gets weirder. CBC reports that StubHub struck a deal with Colloquy Capital, an affiliate of Baker’s own fund, to bankroll *other* mass scalpers, fronting them short-term financing to buy up and flip even more tickets on StubHub. So the company isn’t quietly tolerating industrial-scale scalping from the sidelines. According to the filings CBC reviewed, it’s helping fund it, through a firm run by its own CEO.
StubHub declined CBC’s repeated interview requests, telling the outlet only that “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.” Which is a very lawyerly way of saying: yep, it’s all true, please stop asking.
Randy Nichols, a band manager who has researched the ticketing industry for the National Independent Talent Organization, put it bluntly to CBC: “It’s just very deceiving. StubHub’s told the public they’re a marketplace, they want to be treated as a marketplace. What they leave out is that their CEO is a large ticket seller.”
Jeff Ripley, a Spokane fan who got stiffed on World Cup tickets and is still fighting for a refund, called it exactly what it sounds like: “That sounds like a conflict of interest.” He added, “I think most of us know that, yeah, there are mass scalpers out there. But now to find out that StubHub is providing short-term financing for those mass scalpers to purchase ticket…. that’s a revelation.”
Here’s where the math gets ugly. CBC notes StubHub moved $9.2 billion in tickets in 2025, and that an estimated 70 to 80 percent of tickets on global resale sites are controlled by mass scalpers, not the mythical guy offloading his extra Coldplay pair.
Christopher MacDonald, a business ethics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, told CBC the issue isn’t the small-time reseller. It’s the industrial version: “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.”
Even Dan Wall, a Live Nation/Ticketmaster exec, conceded to CBC that the scalper-dominated resale model is ultimately “exploitive,” which is a hell of a word to hear from the guy at Ticketmaster, of all places.
This part that really stings: StubHub has already gone on record against exactly this kind of scalping, just not its own. When President Trump signed an executive order targeting “exploitative ticket scalping” last year, flanked by Kid Rock in the Oval Office, StubHub rushed out a statement praising it.
“StubHub applauds President Trump for taking steps to better protect fans from ticket bots and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities in the primary ticket market,” the company said, per Variety, adding that it “welcome[s] more transparency, safety, and competition to improve the industry for fans.” That’s a nice thing to say for a company whose own CEO, it turns out, was quietly bankrolling the bad actors the whole time.
On X, I commented that I “feel like Scooby Doo just pulled the mask off the villain that puts concert tickets on reselling apps a mere seconds after they go on sale. Literally the most obvious suspect.”
Here at BroBible, we’ve already been tracking the fallout. StubHub is currently facing a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit in California, alleging the company sold World Cup tickets it never delivered, leaving fans out thousands of dollars and, in one case, stranded in Mexico City for a match that never happened. Consumer Protection BC and the Texas attorney general are both circling.
This CBC report explains why the pile keeps growing.
If your platform’s CEO is financially entangled with the scalpers flooding your marketplace, “we cancelled your order due to the event organizer’s ticketing infrastructure” starts to sound…. very fishy, almost like a business model working exactly as designed.
StubHub wants you to believe it’s just the ref, calling the game straight down the middle. But it sounds like the ref has money on the favorite.