The Dallas Cowboys are in the National Football League playoffs, and that has a lot of fans excited, including Mark, who planned to attend the game next week with a friend. Except, when he received the tickets purchased off of StubHub, they weren’t for the game in Jan. 2017, they were for the game in Jan. 2016. 

That’s right, Mark says in a reddit post he got tickets to a game that never actually happened — the Cowboys didn’t make it to the post-season last year.

Mark says that while he wasn’t pleased to receive the wrong tickets, he felt that policy was on his side.

“StubHub has the fan protection guarantee,” Mark wrote on reddit, “and it’s not their fault some jerk scammed me.”

Under the guarantee, StubHub claims to “back every qualified order so you can buy and sell with 100% confidence.” With the guarantee, the company says that buyers will get their tickets in time for the event, they will be valid for entry, and they will be the same as those you ordered.

In Mark’s case, a few of those points weren’t met. And, according to StubHub’s guarantee, if that’s the case, it will “find you comparable or better tickets to the event, or offer you a refund or FanCode for future purchase.”

But when Mark called StubHub, he says they were anything but helpful.

Instead, the company told him the tickets were a misprint. Because Mark didn’t think that was the case, he did a bit of sleuthing on reddit.

“It was clear that these were last year’s tickets,” he wrote, inking to photos posted elsewhere on reddit showing that his ticket looked like last year’s passes, and that this year’s Cowboys playoff tickets look very different:

“Armed with this evidence I called back figuring that this has to be overwhelming proof I received illegitimate tickets,” Mark recalls in his post. “Nope, they still claimed it was a misprint.”

One that just so happened to have the exact same look as last year’s tickets and include the same date, Mark points out.

StubHub said they would only offer Mark a refund if he went to the venue and was rejected.

That’s a problem for Mark, though, as he doesn’t live in Dallas.

“I’m flying in for the game, which means I will have to spend hundreds of dollars just to make sure I get a refund,” he says.

Several fellow redditors suggested that Mark check the validity of the tickets on Ticket Exchange, which has a verification system.

Mark says that he took that advice and confirmed that the tickets he received were, in fact, invalid.

In the time that Mark waited for another response from StubHub he says he also contacted the Cowboys’ ticket seller — TicketMaster, who said they couldn’t help.

Later Friday afternoon, Mark updated his reddit post, saying that StubHub had reached out to him.

“After further review, they determined these were indeed last year’s tickets, and as a result they are providing me new tickets in an adjacent section,” he writes.

That’s great, but he’s still frustrated that it took creating a reddit post to get results.

“I hope moving forward that they implement escalation procedures, so that fans like me don’t feel completely left out in the cold when something happens,” he wrote.

Consumerist reached out to StubHub about Mark’s situation, asking why the guarantee wasn’t relied on in the first place, how many misprints occur, and why it too so long to remedy the debacle.

The company did provide a statement, but failed to address the issues.

“We certainly understand the frustration for this buyer and happy that we were able to resolve the issue so he could get to the game,” a rep for the company tells Consumerist. “As a marketplace with thousands of transactions a day, rare issues like this can happen and we work to solve them as soon as we can.”

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