With over 24 hours left in his online auction, you would have to think this eBay user was pretty happy about the way things were going.
Selling two student guest tickets to the Cavaliers' final regular season home game, prized tickets against hated rival Virginia Tech that have a face value of $50 apiece, this Virginia student had received 13 different bids for the passes to the sold-out game, the highest standing at $275. By the time the auction finally ended Thursday night, the price would have likely approached $400.
So why would this mysterious individual cancel his auction and likely ruin the 100 percent positive feedback rating he had built up and boasted about? The truth may lie in the fact that guy may not be so mysterious after all.
A quick people search on the U.Va. homepage reveals an undergraduate student at Virginia whose U.Va. computing ID is identical to the eBay user name selling the student guest tickets. Considering that only students currently enrolled at the school have the ability to purchase student guest tickets, it doesn't take much detective work to figure out how this guy got his hands on these passes.
Student guest tickets went on sale Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. Those who got there early enough only had to wait about an hour and a half or so. Some of us stragglers weren't so lucky. I stood in line for three hours that afternoon. Some people had to wait upwards of four hours to get a chance to spend pay $100 dollars for a pair of tickets to the season finale against the Hokies.
There were also those who weren't as lucky as I was. According to the Virginia ticket office, over 2,500 student guest passes were sold in a nine-hour period on Tuesday and as of Wednesday afternoon, only a couple hundred remained. Some people weren't willing or able to skip class and give up half their day to stand in line. They couldn't manage to allot a three-hour block in the middle of a weekday to wait in line at Bryant Hall. But that didn't stop this student from putting his tickets up for auction.
He couldn't even wait until the tickets officially went on sale. The eBay user opened up his auction on the night of Monday Sept. 5, more than 12 hours before the Bryant Hall ticket office opened its windows to students. So it's not like this guy bought his tickets and then discovered later that he couldn't make the game. The student went to Bryant Hall Tuesday morning with the explicit purpose of buying the tickets to sell them on the internet and make a nice little profit.
To top things off, every student that did buy a ticket signed an honor form that states that the student will not try to sell their tickets with intent for profit. Had the sale been completed, this guy may have had some explaining to do.
Of course, the sale wasn't completed for one reason or another. Maybe his conscience got to him. Maybe he was afraid he'd get kicked out of school for an honor violation. Maybe he found out I was planning to write a column in today's Cavalier Daily exposing his eBay escapades. Either way, I would be surprised if this is the only incident of student guest tickets appearing on eBay before the Nov. 19 matchup.
Last year, several student guest tickets found their way onto eBay and who knows how many more were dealt off to online brokers. The honor agreement students were forced to sign when purchasing tickets may deter some student guest ticket holders this time around, but I'm not overly concerned about the honor implications of auctioning the tickets off. I just think that students should be the only ones allowed to purchase these tickets.
Any student has the ability to get a refund for their student guest tickets to the Virginia Tech game up to 24 hours before kickoff. That means anybody can get their money back and ensure that a Virginia student gets the tickets, since any passes turned back in will be open up again for sale to those with a valid student ID.
Making hundreds of dollars in profits simply by putting some tickets on eBay may sound tempting. But anybody lucky enough to get tickets owes it to the hundreds of students who spent hours waiting, the dozens of people who had to leave the line, and the hundreds, if not thousands more who couldn't land tickets for one reason or another to make their tickets available exclusively to students. At least one student wised up. I only hope other ticket holders will follow suit.
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