What Happened
The FTC says some people who bought tickets on StubHub between May 12 and May 14, 2025 may receive refunds tied to the agency's case over allegedly deceptive pricing. The issue was not whether ticket fees exist. The issue was the much more American tradition of pretending a price is one thing until the exact moment you are psychologically committed to paying another.
The agency says the case involved failure to clearly show the total price, including mandatory charges, upfront. Which means millions of adults once again got the official reminder that many online checkout flows are just ambushes with better fonts.
Why This Belongs Here
Hidden fees are not a glitch in internet commerce. They are a business genre. The whole point is to get you emotionally attached to the purchase before the platform reveals the rest of the damage. By then your brain has already started attending the concert, game, or event, so the company gambles that outrage will lose to momentum.
That is why this fits here even if it is not a classic scam in the criminal sense. It is scam-adjacent behavior polished into corporate normalcy: keep the advertised number low, stash the real price behind a few clicks, and call it user experience optimization.
The Beautifully Dumb Part
The platform economy spent years acting as if consumers just naturally loved math problems at checkout. No, people did not want a treasure hunt for the actual price. They tolerated it because the entire market kept doing it. And now the FTC has to step in and say, essentially, yes, the total price should probably be the price.
Truly groundbreaking consumer-protection territory: if you charge money, perhaps mention all of it before the last screen.
Source
FTC Consumer Advice: Did you buy tickets on StubHub between May 12-14 last year?