A Winnipegger whose credit card was compromised in a recent Ticketmaster security breach wants to see a class-action lawsuit launched against the entertainment-industry giant.
The federal privacy commissioner announced Wednesday it would be investigating Ticketmaster’s practices with respect to security safeguards and whether the company complied with breach notification requirements.
Geoff Peters was reading a Free Press story detailing another Manitoban’s experience of being skimmed thousands of dollars from her Ticketmaster-linked credit card when he checked his Visa statement.
A Winnipegger whose credit card was compromised blames the Ticketmaster data breach. The company is being investigated by the federal privacy commissioner regarding its practices leading up to the breach. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press files)
He found a July 14 charge for US$2,100 to the American Registry of Pathology, a medical book company based in Maryland.
“I’m like, ‘This doesn’t sound like anything I would have ever bought, let alone spend more than my entire paycheque on, on a Saturday night,” Peters said Wednesday.
Ticketmaster, owned by U.S.-based Live Nation Entertainment Inc., notified customers in early July that “an unauthorized third party” snagged information from a cloud database in April and May.
The company said the accessed data could have included customers’ names, basic contact information and payment-card information such as encrypted credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates.
Peters never received a notification from Ticketmaster that his information was included in the breach, but the timing raised red flags.
“This is the only account that it could have happened to,” he said. “It just seemed too coincidental to be a coincidence.”
He later found out the same company tried to charge another $1,500 to his card, but the purchase was flagged and declined.
The Winnipegger hasn’t used his Ticketmaster account in nearly a year; he began boycotting the California-based company when ticket prices increased exponentially and became too expensive to justify buying.
“It’s always been at the top of my least-favourite companies and I would love if there was some class-action lawsuit,” he said.
Privacy Commissioner of Canada Philippe Dufresne said the investigation will help the agency understand why the cyber incident happened and what must be done to prevent it from happening again.
This is not the first time Ticketmaster has faced a federal investigation and litigation; in 2019 the company was ordered to pay $4.5 million to settle misleading pricing claims in online ticket sales after its 2010 amalgamation with events promoter and venue operator Live Nation.
Dufresne says data breaches have surged over the last decade and have increased in both their scale and complexity.
Ticketmaster offered affected account holders complimentary, one-year credit and identity monitoring.
While Peters can’t conclusively say the data breach was to blame for the unauthorized charge on his credit card, the experience cemented his feelings about the company.
The soured music fan wants to see Live Nation and Ticketmaster break up the monopoly on ticket sales to make events more accessible for fans. He’d also like to see damages paid to affected customers for the grief of the data breach.
“But it would take more than that for me to actually go back to buying Ticketmaster tickets,” he said.
– with files from the Canadian Press
nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca
Nicole Buffie
Multimedia producer
Nicole Buffie is a multimedia producer who reports for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College’s Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom in 2023. Read more about Nicole.
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