A football fan who sued the Los Angeles Chargers alleging the NFL team committed fraud in its season ticket sales operation has dropped the case after an Orange County judge rejected the arguments as weak unless satisfactorily amended.
Michael Ungerleider accused the Chargers of illegal business practices for promising he could purchase season tickets at the “best price,” only to learn later that the team also wanted a $60,000 license fee in addition to the actual price of the seats.
Superior Court Judge James A. Delaney studied the September 2018 lawsuit and in late April observed: “The law is quite clear that expressions of opinion are not generally treated as representations of fact. . . Representations of value are opinions.”
Delaney then ruled in agreement with the team’s stance that, “The claim that the plaintiff would receive a special opportunity to purchase season tickets at the “best price” is puffery and cannot form the basis of a fraud case of action.”
The judge explained the ticket promotion used used legally permissible “boasts, all-but-meaningless superlatives . . . no reasonable consumer would take as anything more weighty than an advertising slogan.”
In an October 2018 Facebook posting, Ungerleider explained he’d tried “to reason with” Chargers management about the license fee prior to spending $435 to file the lawsuit and that the motivation of taking legal action was more about principle than money.
After the 2017 move from San Diego to play in LA, the Chargers made Costa Mesa its practice home.
Upcoming season ticket prices for the Bolts can be checked using the team’s interactive stadium seating map.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.