StubHub Lawsuit: Canadian Fans Demand Accountability After Ticket Cancellations
Mark Gallagher thought he’d done everything right.
He paid early. He paid big. He followed the rules.
Then, hours before kick-off of Canada vs. Qatar in Vancouver on June 18, his $11,407 pair of prime World Cup seats vanished with a cancellation notice from StubHub.
The refund came. The moment didn’t. Now he’s taking them to court.
Gallagher, a Vancouver resident, has filed a proposed class action on behalf of Canadian ticket buyers after the resale giant cancelled his tickets and those of thousands of other fans. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Vancouver, accuses StubHub of a “conspiracy of deception” by advertising and selling tickets “which they knew would not or could not be honoured.”
None of the allegations have been tested in court, but the frustration is already on full display.
“I just think the truth needs to come out on what's really going on here,” Gallagher told CBC News. Missing the match, he said, isn’t something a refund can fix. “You never get to see it again, even though you had the full intent and followed whatever the rules were to get there. So what I hope to get out of this is change.”
He is the first to launch a class action against StubHub in Canada, following similar legal moves in New York and California after the company cancelled thousands of World Cup tickets.
StubHub, which promotes a “FanProtect Guarantee” promising refunds or replacement tickets “within 5 business days,” declined to answer detailed questions about its refund and dispute practices. Instead, it issued a broad statement:
“Our goal is to get every fan into their event, every time, and if something goes wrong, we always want to find them replacement tickets. We never want to give a refund and no fan wants to receive one — we want you to get to your event.”
For many fans, that promise has felt hollow.
Travel, hotels, and a guarantee with limits
The World Cup is not a casual outing. It’s time off work, flights, hotels, gas, food — and for some, a once-in-a-lifetime trip with family.
Kelly Mongillo knows that too well.
She drove 10 hours from Barrie, Ont., to New Jersey with her elderly father for a June 13 World Cup match, spending about $2,500 on travel and accommodation on top of $1,800 for tickets bought through StubHub.
Game day. Outside the stadium. Then the email: cancelled.
Mongillo says StubHub’s FanProtect Guarantee gave her a “false sense of security.” She told CBC News the company repeatedly assured her that replacement tickets would be provided if the originals fell through, yet it has refused to cover any of her travel-related costs.
Their own rules back them up. StubHub’s “Global User Agreement” includes a waiver that seeks to block Canadian and U.S. customers from suing for anything beyond the ticket price — no travel expenses, no legal fees, no compensation for the experience lost.
When Mongillo went public in June, StubHub responded. It offered her a refund and replacement tickets to a different World Cup game in Toronto. Her father couldn’t attend, but she accepted the tickets.
The money, she says, is another story. Mongillo claims StubHub has since reneged on the cash refund.
The pattern: complain, wait, repeat — unless you hire a lawyer
If you’re waiting on StubHub to send your money back, patience alone may not be enough.
Jennifer Hale of Toronto paid nearly $3,000 for tickets to a Team Canada game in Toronto on June 12. StubHub cancelled. She immediately requested a refund.
More than a month later, she was still waiting.
Hale says she has spent hours on the phone, repeatedly told to “wait 72 hours,” only for nothing to happen. The latest explanation she received suggested it could take up to 45 days. “I’m not sure what else to do?” she wrote in an email.
Just as some fans resigned themselves to the delay, others changed tactics.
After a month of what he describes as excuses, Denis Radetic of Georgetown, Ont., hired a U.S. lawyer. That lawyer has been contacted by hundreds of StubHub users seeking help.
In a letter threatening legal action, Radetic demanded both a refund and $3,000 US in lawyer’s fees, accusing StubHub of “potential fraud … negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract.”
He believes the company is testing customers’ resolve.
“I'm sure a lot of people are hesitant about hiring a lawyer,” he said. “I feel like StubHub is kind of taking advantage and seeing who will really push them to get the money back versus who will just kind of let it go with time and perhaps not get their money back.”
This time, pressure worked. On Sunday, StubHub contacted Radetic and refunded his credit card. The company would not explain why customers with lawyers — or media coverage — seem to get faster results.
Then came the final twist: a StubHub survey asking Radetic how he enjoyed the game he never saw.
Arbitration: a maze, not a map
On paper, StubHub has a system for disputes. In practice, fans and lawyers say it’s a minefield.
The company’s official policy directs unhappy customers to file “notices of dispute” through a U.S.-based arbitration process. For those already burned by cancellations, that means more paperwork, more delays, more uncertainty.
Brad Clements, a lawyer in Menlo Park, Calif., who helped Radetic and now represents hundreds of StubHub buyers and sellers in both the U.S. and Canada, says the process is designed to wear people down.
“They're trying to make it look like they're going to do right by the consumer and they really care about the consumer. But it's a total farce, because they have everything actually designed to intimidate you, delay you, deny you, if you do bring a dispute.”
One example stands out. Clements says StubHub has changed the address for certified-mail dispute notices seven times in the last 14 months. Each change forces fans to track down new information or risk sending documents to the wrong place.
StubHub’s Canadian site, StubHub.ca, doesn’t list where or how to file these official disputes at all.
StubHub declined to answer why the address keeps changing or why its Canadian site omits those details.
“They don't want people bringing cases,” Clements said. “They want to make it so godawful for you that you don't go and tell your friends that you won your refund plus interest plus some amount for lost time plus punitive damages, right?”
How StubHub profits when the game never happens
Fans might assume that when a ticket order collapses, everyone loses.
Not quite.
Randy Nichols, a New York-based band manager familiar with ticketing platforms, says StubHub can still profit when it cancels an order. Once fans are refunded, StubHub turns to the seller.
Under its policies, StubHub can charge the seller an amount equal to the ticket price — or more — even though it never owned the ticket itself. The stated goal is to deter fraudulent or bogus listings.
”The way StubHub is currently structured, they charge the seller a 100 per cent fine on every ticket that they don't deliver. Which means that StubHub makes money on every order that they don’t fulfill,” Nichols said.
StubHub declined to comment, but its seller rules are clear: “If you dropped your sale, we will charge your payment method an amount equal to the greater of (i) 100% of the price of the ticket(s) sold or (ii) the full amount incurred by us to remedy the dropped sale.”
For fans locked out at the turnstiles, that structure raises a sharp question: who really pays the price when a sale falls apart, and who quietly comes out ahead?
The interest game
There’s another layer: time.
Every day a refund is delayed, StubHub continues to hold fans’ money. On a small scale, it’s frustrating. Across thousands of transactions, it becomes something else entirely.
Jeff Ripley of Spokane, Wash., is taking StubHub to arbitration over cancelled World Cup tickets he bought last December, only to see them voided on game day. He argues the company owes him more than face value.
“They're sitting on that money, making interest on it. How many thousands of people has this happened to?” he asked in an interview with CBC News.
StubHub reportedly earned $41 million in interest in the year before its November 2025 earnings report. It also facilitated the resale of $9.2 billion in tickets globally last year.
The company declined to comment on the interest it collects on customers’ funds.
Ripley sees a system that looks less like a ticket marketplace and more like a financial machine.
He likens it to giving a bank a free loan: “There's something wrong. They almost work like a financial institution in that I deposited money in a savings or checking account and they got interest.”
For him, the issue goes beyond one cancelled match or one missing refund.
“There has to be some accountability for companies that are taking money, earning interest on it and then not providing a product.”
Gallagher’s lawsuit, and the growing line of fans and lawyers behind him, suggests that question of accountability is no longer staying in the stands.
