The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is reportedly investigating a man that sold more than 35,000 Chicago White Sox tickets through StubHub over the course of two years.
The majority of the passes sold by Bruce Lee between 2016 and 2018 included complimentary “ticket vouchers” given by the team to friends and family of the players, youth groups and commercial sponsors.
The team’s analytics department determined that 96 per cent of the tickets sold by Lee involved complimentary ticket vouchers.
The FBI search warrant affidavit, filed last December and unsealed in U.S. District Court on Wednesday, said: “In order for a person to receive a ticket using a complimentary voucher, the person must come to the White Sox box office and exchange the voucher for a ticket.
“Accordingly, it is reasonably believed that there is no legitimate means for anyone to obtain the high volume of complimentary tickets that Lee sold on StubHub.”
A senior vice president of the team notified the FBI of the irregularity in October 2018, after the White Sox analytics team noticed the anomaly in data shared between StubHub and the team through a partnership with Major League Baseball.
It attracted attention because the number of tickets sold by Lee was thousands of times greater than anyone else on the site. In 2018, he sold at least 11,000 White Sox tickets on the site – 10,871 more than his closest competitor, the affidavit said.
The MLB team also noticed that Lee’s tickets were being posted on StubHub a short time after being printed at the box office. This indicated that a “White Sox employee or employees are working with Lee in posting the sale of thousands of complimentary tickets by misappropriating and printing the tickets, and then electronically transmitting the barcode information to Lee.”
No one has been charged in the probe, according to a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office.
Image: redlegsfan21
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