PreferredSeat.com Blog

The Jay Z and Eminem concert tonight in New York at the Meadowlands is very popular with fans but the concert is also atracting a large number of attempted credit card fraud orders. Preferred Seating tickets has had an unusual number of attempted fraud orders the last day and a half and all the requests have been for the electronic tickets.

In most cases the telephone numbers of those attempting the credit card fraud don’t match with the city or state the card holder is residing in. The credit card thieves don’t even bother to list an active phone number in some cases or when contacted they sometimes forget the card holders name they are stealing from.

Even though Preferred Seating tickets are located in California, they’ve been around for 23 years and they sell a lot of tickets on the web so often they are targeted often by credit card thieves. But what the thieves don’t know is Preferred Seating takes great pride in combating credit card fraud and often require extensive proof for last minute orders and electronic ticket orders.

But you can expect a few credit card holders to be opening up their bills in the next 30 days and finding they were charged for a Jay Z and Eminem concert they didn’t attend. And several ticket brokers will be issuing chargebacks for not being careful enough.

I received an email from Ticketmaster today and it was titled “Great Seats for Michael Buble Still Available”.  Anybody that has ever bought a ticket from Ticketmaster online receives the same thing because your email address is automatically put on a list to send these offers to.

And it wouldn’t be so bad except that every time I rush and click like an idiot I find the same lousy seats. In this case they were seats far behind the stage, but at full price. Staring at Michael Buble’s ass all night may be fine for some, but for full price it is not a “Great Seat for Michael Buble”.

 To put out these emails to sell off the crap seats is bogus. At least they should tell the truth, “Michael Buble tickets with a lousy view with questionable sound and sightlines, behind the stage for the same price that everyone else paid to see and hear well, on sale now”

 In the old days, but only a year or two ago, those seats were referred to as “Side Stage – possible obstructed view”. But now they have cleaned up the stage so nothing gets in the way, but they cannot make up for the view from the side and back, and the sound quality from those seats.

 For a few dollars more, you can find some of the best seats for Michael Buble through a ticket broker. Preferred Seating has some great seats at above face value, but with great views of Michael Buble and you can hear him sing. This is why you go in the first place.

Have you tried to find concert tickets with no hidden fees or service charges only to find dozens of websites with fees that you don’t see until after you choose a shipping method? Is it a coincidence that they all follow the same pattern?

It’s not a coincidence because a large number of websites selling concert tickets are owned by a few large corporations, many of which are struggling to sell tickets this summer and rely on hidden fees to attract customers to their site. They have tickets with hidden fees to hide the fact that they are charging much more than established ticket sellers such as Preferred Seating Tickets.

Even the largest ticket reseller in the country, Stubhub, uses hidden fees to hide higher ticket prices. You won’t see the additional 10% that Stubhub adds on to the ticket price until you enter all of your personal information though. And the cost to the customer gets higher as the cost of the ticket rises because the fee is a percent of the total, not a fixed fee so you may end up paying hundreds of dollars more per ticket.

Concert fans call the offices of Preferred Seating Tickets often asking how they keep their concert ticket prices so low. The difference is in the markup. You can find most of the same tickets on all the tickets websites, large and small. But few ticket brokers can match the low ticket prices at  Preferred Seating Tickets because of  lower overhead and 23 years of connections in the ticket industry.