MLSE Scams Ticket Buyers, World Yawns

by Jes

The Toronto Maple Leafs organization just continues to be one of the very worst in all of professional sports. To the days of Harold Ballard to the constant inept too-many-cooks management to corrupt employees, the Maple Leafs are just one gigantic joke.

The latest blight to come from Hogtown is a delicious little ticket scam that a few employees develops to 'cash' in on some hockey-starved fans.

From the Toronto Star:

Rob Tanguay thought it was odd when a Toronto Maple Leafs employee told him to bring an envelope stuffed with $5,000 in cash to a truck stop in Milton to help cover the cost of hockey tickets.

A vice-president with a St. Thomas-based transportation company, Tanguay was a typical Leafs fan who figured he might never get his own season seats at the Air Canada Centre. He'd been on a waiting list for season tickets for some 15 years when, out of the blue, he received a call from a Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment sales employee last spring.

"He told me someone wanted to give up their seats and he had tried to reach three other people on the wait list. I was Number 4 and he asked if I was still interested in tickets," Tanguay said.

The seller was looking to dump a pair of tickets in the red section and wanted to sell the personal-seat licences for $20,000 apiece, Tanguay said. There was one hitch: Tanguay said the MLSE employee wanted him to bring $5,000 in cash – at the seller's request – to cement the deal.

"After I bought the tickets, I looked up the seller's name on Canada411.com and contacted him, asking whether he'd received the cash," Tanguay said. "He hadn't. I knew right then I'd been scammed. I called (the MLSE employee) back and asked why he had wanted the $5,000 and he told me that the seller was lying and he had given him the cash. I didn't believe him but I didn't do anything about it at the time."

Reached at his home, the MLSE sales employee declined to comment. He is one of five employees in the MLSE ticketing department who were fired 10 days ago.

Now, this Tanguay guys doesn't seem like the dullest knife in the drawer, so he must have been some kind of desparate to have been scammed like this.

How could ANYONE actually think that you'd have to meet an employee at a TRUCK STOP, and not an official office, and exchange cold hard CASH, and not think something is fishy is beyond me. Yet, Tanguay went through with the exchange as he was so hell-bent on getting his tickets. Sheesh.

Yes, I realize that these are the actions of a select few employees, but the Maple Leafs certainly didn't do a good job in screening these employees and keeping tabs on them. It speaks to the ineptness of the Leafs organization that stuff like this occurs, and that it takes an outsider to ring the alarm bells.

As an aside, PERSONAL SEAT LICENSES have to be one of the best legal scams in years. It's bad enough that you get gouged for just buying a regular ticket, but now a team can charge an extra fee just for having the ability to renew your season tickets year after year. What happened to customer loyalty? What happened to asking the guy if he just wants to renew or not? Sad....