If you've ever bought sports or concert tickets through a third party reseller, this may ring a bell.
A Montreal man says a recent experience at the Bell Centre before a Montreal Canadiens game has left a bad taste in his mouth.
"Why do we have to pay to get something printed when we already have it on our phones?" said Thomas Androvic who describes what happened when he and his friends showed up at the Bell Centre with hockey tickets they bought through a third party source.
They had to pay five dollars per ticket to have them printed before going to the game. Androvic said they were told it was for "environmental fees."
"I tried to explain well the reason why we did this is because those tickets we do have were unavailable on the Montreal Canadiens website," said Androvic who contacted yourstory@cjad.com.
Androvic said the incident made them miss ten minutes of the first period and they were given some pizza as some compensation.
Montreal Canadiens spokesman Donald Beauchamp said their policy clearly encourages fans to buy tickets from their website or the official box office to discourage fraud. Beauchamp said their system doesn't recognize tickets from third party resellers which are impossible to police and verify, calling those companies modern-day scalpers.
Androvic said there should be new laws regulating third party ticket sellers online.
"It's not our fault that we have to look for third party vendors. If they were to somehow bring in laws or regulations to discourage third party vendors from purchasing all these tickets before the general public, this would probably be something that works better," said Androvic.
Quebec Minister for Consumer Protection Lise Thériault is looking into the issue.
A spokesperson for her office said in an email to CJAD 800 News that they have been "alerted to the problem and are following it closely."
They've already begun looking into possible changes to ticket selling laws and are analyzing solutions.
Ontario passed a law late last year banning so-called scalper bots, which scoop up many tickets online for an event and resell them at huge markups.