Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a lawsuit against Seattle-based Brown Paper Tickets, accusing the company of failing to pay event organizers and not refunding consumers for tickets they purchased.
The 10-year-old company, which offers low-cost ticketing services to event organizers and acts as an intermediary between event organizers and ticket buyers, is accused of engaging in unfair and deceptive acts that violated Washington’s Consumer Protection Act according to the lawsuit, filed in King County Superior Court.
Brown Paper Tickets allegedly failed to pay some organizers for events that occurred before COVID-19 shutdowns and has not refunded ticket buyers for purchases they made for events cancelled due to the pandemic. Ferguson asserts that the company owes organizers approximately $6 million and ticket buyers $760,000 nationwide.
In a statement on its website related to COVID-19 recovery, last updated Sept. 14, Brown Paper Tickets founder and President William Scott Jordan said that the company has been working through a backlog of refund requests and that he was unable to offer a timeline on when refunds would be paid out. He acknowledged that patience was “wearing thin” for those awaiting payment.
“It’s a long process with thousands of events canceled, postponed, or abandoned,” Jordan wrote. “Like many businesses, we were unprepared for a crisis of this scale, but we are making headway.”
Ferguson’s office has received 583 complaints from consumers about the company’s conduct and around 80,000 people have been affected nationwide. The attorney general is asking the court for $2,000 per violation of the Consumer Protection Act, restitution for ticket buyers and event organizers and an order stopping the company from further violating the law.
