Mexico Probes Ticketmaster After Bad Bunny Fans Get Fake Tickets

(Bloomberg) -- Mexico’s consumer protection agency is investigating whether Ticketmaster is to blame for stranding more than a thousand Bad Bunny fans outside a concert last week.

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President Andrés Manuel López Obrador vowed to get money back to the titleholders who were rejected at the doors of Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium last Friday. Their tickets had been cloned, he said.

“It moved us to see young people crying because they cloned their tickets, because they committed fraud against them,” said AMLO, as the president is known, at his daily press conference on Wednesday. It’s not Bad Bunny’s fault, he said, “It’s the fault of the ticket sellers.”

In a statement, Ticketmaster denied any wrongdoing and blamed the rejections on an “unprecedented number of counterfeit tickets” that caused confusion and “impeded the identification of legitimate tickets for some moments.”

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The company, which is a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment Inc., added that more than 4.5 million people sought tickets for only 120,000 seats over two days. It said it was cooperating with the investigation and denied overselling tickets.

Ricardo Sheffield, the head of Mexico’s consumer protection agency, said in an interview with the Mexican outlet Aristegui Noticias on Monday that Ticketmaster could be fined for the approximately 1,600 people affected. It would then be forced to pay those customers an extra 20% of the value of each ticket beyond full reimbursement, he said.

In its statement, Ticketmaster said it would provide an additional 20% refund to any customer that requested a refund, as well.

Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton powerhouse, sold out venues across North America for his tours this year, grossing $393.3 million and selling more than 1.6 million tickets, according to end-of-year data from industry group Pollstar.

During the press conference on Wednesday, AMLO invited Bad Bunny to Mexico City to give a free concert in a public square, to help make up the loss to fans, though he said the concert might not have the pizazz of the stadium.

“We’ll take care of the stage and the lights, of course, though it won’t be as spectacular as in the Azteca,” AMLO said. “I saw that he came out flying on a palm tree. We can’t do that here.”

--With assistance from Ashley Carman.

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