Worst Company In America Round 1: Ticketmaster Vs. Equifax

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It’s another glorious day of carnage in the WCIA mosh pit, as a perennial Golden Poo also-ran takes on an unseasoned newbie in a battle to the last breath.

As shown by the success of Louis C.K.’s approach to ticket-selling, it’s hard to argue for the continued need of a company like Ticketmaster, and yet it breathes on, hiding ridiculous, unwanted add-on packages in the fine print, jumping the gun on events like the Presidential Inauguration, or the Great American Beer Festival.

Then Ticketmaster ditches its annoying Captcha security checks, only to replace them with ads for its marketing partners.

Meanwhile, its bizarre fee structure and monopolistic connection to parent company Live Nation is still resulting in lawsuits from Arkansas, to Baltimore, to federal court.

Given recent revelations about the high error rate in credit reports, and that none of the credit bureaus seem to actually listen to consumers about problems with their reports and scores, or the fact that the scores consumers see are sometimes wildly different than the ones shown to banks, we weren’t surprised to see the names of all three major bureaus — Equifax, Experian, TransUnion — suggested for inclusion in this year’s WCIA bracket, but only Equifax was named enough times to actually earn a spot in the tournament.

That’s because it hasn’t exactly been a banner year for a company most consumers treat, at best, as a necessary evil. First, it got caught improperly selling lists of people who were late on their mortgage payments. Then came a spate of reports about Equifax’s Work Number employment database, which contains a ridiculous amount of potentially sensitive information on around 1/3 of the entire U.S. workforce and which users told Consumerist basically works on an honor system.

Enough of this chit-chat. For the next three hours, you can vote free-fee!

VOTING FOR THIS POLL IS NOW CLOSED. CONGRATULATIONS TO TICKETMASTER FOR MOVING ON TO THE NEXT ROUND!

This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2013 series. The companies competing for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. See the entire WCIA 2013 bracket HERE.

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