Ticketmaster class-action settlement to reimburse 1M Canadians for deceptive fees
People who bought event tickets through Ticketmaster in 2018 are now eligible for compensation.
A $6-million settlement that could see around a million Canadians eligible for a credit with Ticketmaster was finalized last week at Regina's Court of King's Bench.
The lawsuit, launched by plaintiff Crystal Watch, took Ticketmaster to court for hiding the prices of ticket fees in 2018. Ticketmaster refused to agree to any wrongdoing on their part, but the case never went to trial and the company agreed to settle.
The suit was overseen by Justice Graeme Mitchell. He wrote in the published decision that affected customers are eligible to receive up to $45 in Ticketmaster credit to be used toward future ticket purchases. The credit is transferable, but can only be used once.
Watch, who acted as the representative plaintiff, received an honorarium of $25,000, paid from the settlement amount.
The settlement was finazlized at Regina's Court of King's Bench on Jan. 15. (Chris Edwards/CBC)
The class action case claimed that Ticketmaster engaged in unfair "drip pricing," where unnecessary fees outside the regular ticket price were deceptively added to the total price. The lawsuit said this breached The Consumer Protection and Business Practices Act.
In order to be eligible, customers need to have purchased tickets through Ticketmaster for Canadian events between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2018. Customers in Quebec and any Ticketmaster employees aren't eligible for compensation.
Regina lawyer Tony Merchant, whose firm represented the plaintiffs, previously said he believes up to 100,000 people in Saskatchewan and about a million people across Canada could be eligible for a credit.
Eligible Ticketmaster users should get an email shortly from Ticketmaster with a link to receive their credit.
If a Ticketmaster user who is eligible for credit doesn't receive it, Merchant said they can contact his firm.
How the money is being distributed
The lawsuit resulted in a $6-million settlement, out of which lawyers will take $1,725,000 in fees due to the case being a class action lawsuit. This will leave Ticketmaster users with $4.3-million to be distributed between people affected.
"While this case does not involve a mega-settlement, it has proved to be a legitimate consumer protection lawsuit which could only have been viably prosecuted as a class action," the judge said in a written decision. "Class counsel deserve an economic incentive for pursuing this claim to its successful resolution."
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
Who are the people protesting in Los Angeles?
Estrellazul Corral joined protests outside the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center every day this weekend to demand justice for the dozens of migrants detained by armed ICE agents in armored vehicles who targeted jobsites in the city's predominately Latino communities. After hours of peaceful demonstrations, Corral, a social worker focused on the city's unhoused and undocumented population, said the National Guard began to push back. 'They threw tear gas at us, and we were doing what they were telling us to do,' she said. 'Then people just got really upset and angry. And I think that's where you see things starting to escalate.' As the sun set Sunday evening, CNN correspondents documented how the demonstrations descended into violence. Some protesters torched self-driving cars. Some rained rocks down on police sheltering under a highway overpass after marchers shut down traffic. Others spray painted anti-law enforcement slogans on a downtown federal building. At least 21 people were arrested Sunday, the Los Angeles Police Department said. The raids are in keeping with the Trump administration's hardline approach to illegal immigration. But President Trump's decision to federalize and deploy the National Guard against American citizens — the first time a US president has used such power since 1992, when riots erupted after the White officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King were acquitted — sparked a swift backlash that later grew violent. Indeed, the protests appeared divided into separate groups: progressive citizens who felt called to defend the rights of the undocumented, and protesters who appeared determined to drag the city into violent chaos. Unión del Barrio, an organization whose members are dedicated to defending the rights of 'la raza' — or Mexican and indigenous people — within the United States, praised the efforts to fight back against ICE and other agencies. The Los Angeles community has 'the moral authority and universal right to defend our people from kidnappings and family separation,' said a spokesman for the organization in a statement on social media. 'What has happened these days weren't acts of vandalism or crime, they were acts of resistance against a government that is kidnapping our fathers, our mothers, our wives, our husbands, our children,' the spokesman said. 'The people did it out of a deep love and sense of justice for our families and our people.' But one county official described Sunday as 'probably one of the most volatile nights' in the city. Jim McDonnell, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, spoke out against the violent attacks against his officers. At the same time, he drew a distinction between those who protested peacefully during the day and those who stoked the violence at night. 'When I look at the people who are out there doing the violence, that's not the people that we see during the day who are legitimately out there exercising their First Amendment rights to be able to express their feelings about the immigration enforcement issue,' he said. A senior law enforcement source told CNN that intelligence analysts have been conducting assessments on the crowds that gathered Sunday night. They found the many of the protesters were motivated by the recent immigration raids and disdain for the federal government's deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles. But some protesters, the intelligence source said, fit law enforcement profiles of so-called 'professional rioters,' who continually seek out confrontation with law enforcement. After being informed ICE agents were questioning workers at a Pasadena hotel, Pablo Alvarado, the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, began calling for protests to protect vulnerable immigrant communities throughout the city. 'The Pasadena community showed up in large numbers and the message was loud and clear, we don't want to see your armored vehicles, men in masks coming to our communities to pick people up to rip families apart.' But, Alvarado added, he felt the violence that spread throughout the city in response to the raids was tainting their cause. 'Every time that there's violence the most vulnerable communities pay the price. Every time that there are riots, we see the business of low-income communities get burned down,' he said. 'The anger is understandable because you've seen armored vehicles and ICE agents armed to the teeth come into the neighborhoods,' he said. But while he can understand why protesters are angry, Alvarado said there's no excuse for violence. 'We can send the message that we want to send without attacking anybody,' he said. Blocks away from the charred husks of self-driving cars and graffiti-tagged buildings, the families of the people who were detained in the weekend's immigration raids held a news conference Monday morning to call for their loved ones to be released from ICE custody. Clutching signs with photos of their relatives, they each approached the microphone and asked for their loved one's rights and due process to be respected. A young woman named Julian said her entire family was traumatized by watching her father be shackled and led away by ICE agents, but his arrest has been particularly hard on her 4-year-old brother, who is disabled. Although he struggles to communicate, Julian said, her brother hasn't stopped asking for his dad since he was 'kidnapped by ICE.' 'We've told him 'He's working,'' she said. But the truth, she added, has been far more difficult to explain. 'We live in a city that considers itself to be a sanctuary city, but we've all seen that it is not.' Another young woman named Montserrat told reporters her father, George Arrazola, was among the dozens detained in the raid on Los Angeles' Fashion District. 'I was present,' she said. 'I saw with my own eyes the pain of the families crying, screaming, not knowing what to do, just like me,' she said. She called for Los Angeles' status as a 'sanctuary city' to be respected. 'No matter where a person comes from, or how they arrived in this country, their lives (are) valuable,' she said. 'The treatment they received is not right — we demand justice now.' That's why Corral said she kept coming back — despite being repeatedly tear gassed and kettled by law enforcement — because she wanted the people detained to know someone was there, standing up for them. But after days of inhaling pepper spray, Corral said as she faced down the line of armed US National Guardsmen Sunday, she began to wonder what was happening in her country. 'People were screaming, 'Those are weapons of war. Those are weapons to murder people, to kill people in a war zone — that is not for a situation like this,' she said. 'We stood our ground and were like, 'We're not going to let them intimidate us.'' CNN's Sharif Paget, Alaa Elassar and Jack Hannah contributed to this report.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
2 Brilliant High-Yield Energy Stocks to Buy Now and Hold for the Long Term
The energy sector is known for being volatile, though there's one industry segment that bucks the trend. Enterprise Products Partners has a lofty 6.8% yield and decades of annual distribution increases behind it. Enbridge has a 5.9% yield and decades of annual dividend increases behind it. 10 stocks we like better than Enterprise Products Partners › There is one key feature that all investors need to know about the energy sector: The commodity-driven sector can be very volatile. Or, at least, most of it can. There's one niche that actually has a pretty consistent history of reliability, particularly with regard to dividend stocks. This is why even conservative dividend investors will likely find Enterprise Products Partners (NYSE: EPD) and Enbridge (NYSE: ENB) attractive high-yield energy stocks to buy. Here's what you need to know. The energy sector is usually broken down into three subsegments. There is the upstream, which produces oil and natural gas. There is the midstream, which transports oil, natural gas, and the products into which they get turned. And there is the downstream, which processes oil and natural gas into other products, like chemicals and gasoline. The revenues in the upstream are entirely dependent on volatile oil and natural gas commodity prices. There's a similar dynamic in the downstream, since many of the products produced are commodities. However, there's another level of complexity here on the cost side, since oil and natural gas are key inputs. The sole oddity is the midstream, which normally just charges fees for moving commodities from one place to another. The up-front costs to build midstream assets, like pipelines, is fairly large. But once built, the toll-taker model employed generally produces reliable cash flows. Demand for oil and natural gas is more important than the price of oil and natural gas. And since energy is so vital to modern society, demand tends to remain robust even when oil prices are low. Enterprise and Enbridge are both midstream businesses. Just how reliable are Enterprise and Enbridge as dividend stocks? Enterprise, which is a master limited partnership (MLP), has increased its distribution for 26 consecutive years. Enbridge, a Canadian company, has increased its dividend annually for three decades. These are market-proven histories, noting that the energy sector has gone through multiple downturns over the past quarter-century. Right now, Enterprise is offering a distribution yield of 6.8%, while Enbridge has a dividend yield of around 5.9%. Both are well above the market and the broader energy industry. However, those lofty yields will likely make up the lion's share of return here. Slow and steady growth is the norm, but dividend investors probably won't find that trade-off too upsetting. While similar, Enterprise and Enbridge are not perfectly interchangeable. As noted, Enterprise is an MLP, a type of corporate structure that comes with some tax complications (notably having to deal with a K-1 statement on April 15). Enbridge, meanwhile, is Canadian, so its dividend is paid in Canadian dollars (what U.S. investors collect will change with exchange rates), and investors will have to pay Canadian taxes on the dividend (a portion of that can be claimed back come April 15). That said, Enterprise is also more focused on oil and natural gas assets than Enbridge. In fact, Enbridge's specific goal is to adjust its business along with the world's energy needs. So it has been increasingly shifting toward natural gas, including buying natural gas utilities, and it has a small, but growing, clean energy business. Enbridge is probably the more conservative of these two midstream choices. The big theme here, however, is that Enterprise and Enbridge are high-yield investments with reliable businesses that can pay you for years into the future. They aren't the kind of stocks you buy and sell frequently; they are the kind you buy and hold for the long term. That way, you benefit from the slow and steady growth of the dividend, as these reliable income investments keep pumping out cash from what is otherwise a highly volatile industry. If you are looking to boost your investment income in June, Enterprise and Enbridge should be on your list of options. Before you buy stock in Enterprise Products Partners, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Enterprise Products Partners wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $868,615!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 173% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Reuben Gregg Brewer has positions in Enbridge. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Enbridge. The Motley Fool recommends Enterprise Products Partners. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 2 Brilliant High-Yield Energy Stocks to Buy Now and Hold for the Long Term was originally published by The Motley Fool
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
She came to Canada for university, but she'd never been accepted. The scam cost her $7K
With an admission letter to a Quebec university in hand, Aminata flew from Benin, west Africa, to Montreal with $2,000 in her pocket to fulfil her dream of pursuing higher education in Canada. Back in 2022, she'd connected with a man who she says positioned himself as a consultant who could process her documents and submit her university and immigration applications. But not long after she landed in Montreal and made her way to Chicoutimi, Que., she realized it was all a scam. She had not been accepted to university. She did not have a scholarship. Her immigration papers were fraudulent and based on a falsified acceptance letter. "My dream turned into a nightmare," Aminata said. CBC is using a pseudonym to protect her identity because, due to her falsified immigration papers, she is without legal status in Canada. Clasping her hands while sitting in her apartment in Chicoutimi, nearly two years after the ordeal, the 30-year-old Beninois still doesn't feel settled or safe. "I'm living with the fear that at any time I can get deported," she said. "This is not a life." Aminata doesn't want to go back home now, saying she would have to completely "start again" in Benin. Aminata was not the only victim of the scam. CBC News has spoken to another woman who says the same man who presented himself as a consultant took her money after he was hired to submit her university applications. According to an expert, not only is this type of fraud becoming common, but prospective students in Africa are among those targeted by scammers in high numbers. 'I gave him all my money' For Aminata, it all started when she came into contact with the consultant through her uncle. She said the pair agreed on $4,000 before the price for the agent's service went up. "I gave him all my money," she said, adding that it totalled about $7,000 in the end. She sent along the required documents — her birth certificate and diplomas. Within a few months, she was emailed an acceptance letter into the master of organization management program at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. She says the man also managed to get her the Quebec Acceptance Certificate (CAQ) — the province's mandatory document which permits international students to apply for a study permit. Although she considered deferring her acceptance to stay in Benin to save up money, she says the agent, who is also from Benin and studied in Chicoutimi, pressured her to book the flights and start school immediately. "He asked me to not worry. [That] everything is under control," she said. But something was off. She arrived in Montreal on Aug. 28, 2023, and in mere days, the whole scheme unraveled. WATCH | Aminata says her dream turned into a nightmare: She says the consultant suddenly informed her he was deferring her acceptance. A fellow Chicoutimi student in whom she confided about her situation told Aminata she needed to go to the administration to sort out her status as a student. She says the consultant wouldn't answer her calls but when she finally got him on the line, he became defensive, started shouting, and told her not to give the school the documentation and acceptance letter he provided. "They told me that they feel like I have been scammed," she recalled the school's administration saying, adding that she found out her real application file was open but incomplete. She says the consultant had submitted fraudulent paperwork. "That day, I was feeling like this is not true," she said. Another victim, same story Fatim only realized she was a victim of a scam after seeing Aminata's story in a Radio-Canada report. "Her story was the same as mine," said Fatim, who travelled to Quebec from Benin in July 2023. CBC News is also using a pseudonym to protect her identity because of her concerns over her immigration status. She arrived with the intention of starting university in Chicoutimi after receiving an admission letter and documentation from the same consultant as Aminata. Upon arrival, she says the consultant abandoned her despite promises to help her defer her acceptance. "I didn't know it was fraud but I had felt that something was not normal," said Fatim, who says she still feels overwhelmed and "imprisoned" by her situation. Her father, who was responsible for connecting with the consultant, sent him thousands of dollars to help secure the university applications — even selling a property to afford it. Knowing the effort and money he put into helping her, Fatim says she tried to keep the truth from him after her schooling fell through. "One day my dad said, 'my girl, tell me what's really going on?'" said Fatim. "I remember it like it was yesterday." She said once her father found out what happened, his health took a turn for the worse. "He felt responsible for getting his daughter into trouble without even knowing it." He died in December 2024, and Fatim couldn't get back home. Although she considered returning to Benin to her family and husband — whom she hasn't seen in nearly two years — she says she wants to build a life for herself in Canada and prove to Immigration Canada that this was truly not her fault. She says the agent had previously told her she could apply for asylum in Canada to secure her immigration status — a step she said didn't feel right. She says she didn't want to abuse Canada's system. Fatim recalled telling the consultant, "I want another way out of this mess you've gotten me into." CBC News contacted the man who Aminata and Fatim say scammed them. In a brief phone call, he denied allegations that he is an agent who helps people submit applications to university. He also denied having taken any money. CBC has not been able to reach him for follow up questions or an interview. His number has since been deactivated. Dozens of fraudulent admission letters The way things are, victims of immigration fraud often have little recourse, says Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer and policy analyst based in Vancouver. He says it's also more difficult for people to do their due diligence because they are less familiar with the Canadian college system. "The communication infrastructure is not the same," he said. "And literally some people have sold the farm to get to Canada to study. Now those are tragedies." In his career, he says scams for immigration foreign study permits have become as "common as Vancouver rain." The Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC) says 44 cases of fraudulent admission letters were identified by the registrar's office between June and December 2023. While most of the individuals who received these letters did not show up on campus, 12 did, said a university spokesperson in an emailed statement. In cases where individuals showed up on campus with a CAQ document and study permit obtained through the falsified letter, UQAC says they took the "necessary precautions to advise the authorities." UQAC says several calls were made to Quebec's Ministry of Immigration, Francization and Integration to question the validity of the CAQ paperwork obtained by these students. In an emailed statement, the ministry told CBC that in the past few years, admission letters containing "irregular elements" and "inauthentic" parts have been detected in several files. "Although these situations remain marginal in relation to the overall volume of requests processed, they are rigorously monitored," read the statement. The ministry also confirmed that in order to act as an immigration consultant, an individual must be recognized as such by the government. When an immigration consultant obtains this recognition, his or her name is entered in the register of immigration consultants. The name of the consultant both women used is not part of the province's list. 1,550 study permit applications linked to fraud In 2023, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced that investigations uncovered nearly 1,550 study permit applications were linked to fraudulent letters of acceptance. This number also includes those that were detected two to three years prior, it says. These applications were intended for designated learning institutions (DLIs) — a school approved by a provincial or territorial government to host international students, read the statement. "In most of these cases, the fraud was detected and subsequent applications were refused," it said. IRCC says the verification process for acceptance letters requires that DLIs verify the authenticity of all letters. To date, the improved letter of acceptance verification system has intercepted more than 10,000 potentially fraudulent letters of acceptance, IRCC says. 'Nobody is doing anything' Both Fatim and Aminata have blocked the consultant's number and are being represented by the same lawyer in their attempt to find a solution for their cases and move forward. Aminata says when she was first informed about the scam, she told UQAC that the agent who falsified her acceptance was a student. UQAC confirmed to Radio-Canada that he was then expelled from his university program. Aminata applied to the university again, contacted the prime minister, the federal minister of immigration, provincial politicians, the anti-fraud service and local police. "After that, there was a silence," she said. Saguenay police confirmed to Radio-Canada that they could not take on Aminata's file because the fraud happened overseas. In an emailed statement, it says "the victim was referred to her embassy and local police force." "They asked me to talk and I talked and nobody is doing anything," Aminata said. "I still have that little bit of light … hope that things will change."