in our Spotlight on Business Report one of New Jersey's most popular homegrown music festivals has officially been canceled just a week before its big comeback the multi-day Bamboozle event in Atlantic City was slated to start this Thursday but got shut down after organizers failed to get final permits from the city and after months of complaints from ticket buyers who demanded refunds accusing the event's promoter of lying about the musical lineup well now they're struggling to get their money back everyone's pointing fingers at each other Karin Price Mueller is a consumer columnist for NJ Advanced media and the Star Ledger and coincidentally writes a column called Bamboozled she joins me now tell us what's the latest you just updated a story about this event what can we tell fans at this point besides the fact that they're not going to this music festival sure well as you know the complaints have been mounting now the division of Consumer Affairs has received 37 of them as of this morning but part of the confusion here is how people can get their refunds if they received tickets through Ticketmaster or tixer or Eventbrite they can go directly to those entities to get the refund but the promoter said everybody should go to the point of purchase to get their refund but bam ticketing which sold the nft tickets which were the first ones that went for sale their book basically pointing the finger at each other saying to you know people you should go from one to the other and I it's it's a mess for people they don't know where to go for their refunds it's a mess I mean all the while folks are out what hundreds of dollars how much did it cost to get a ticket to this event and what were they promised so it was a three-day pass that went for about 361 dollars and part of the complaint that people had prior to the cancellation of the festival was that the tickets when they were first sold it was promised that these would be the cheapest available and that as more events uh more uh people were added to the lineup more performers came on the tickets would get more expensive but that never happened and eventually there ended up being this hundred dollar discount code so people who bought later in theory could have gotten it cheaper than the first available early bird uh tickets but 361 a pop yeah which is somewhat typical for these type of musical festivals right I mean that you you sign up essentially not knowing what the lineup is going to be but under the premise that ticket sales are only going to go up what's the state attorney general and the consumer affairs Department doing with these complaints well they're not giving any official uh explanation of what they're doing but there's no question that they're looking at them there have been 37 complaints so far but it's complicated because it involves multiple entities and it's going to take some time for the state to try to sort it all out it was a lot of thought and planning going into the event and in its decision to cancel it what can you tell us about the company's stance right now well the company hasn't responded to any of our requests for more information or an explanation beside what they posted on social media but we do know that Atlantic City which is where the festival was supposed to take place did not give uh the festival its final permits um the city said that the festival promoter just hadn't given in all the necessary paperwork so they were unable to approve it and after that happened that's when the festival was canceled but along the line you know in talking about purchasing tickets and not knowing exactly who the performers are going to be that is normal for most festivals but what these people were saying was that the problem was that they promised certain kinds of Acts and that's not what ended up being booked so the people who purchased the tickets said that they purchased them under false pretenses Karen Price Mueller columnist for The Star-Ledger NJ Advanced media who ironically writes a column called Bamboozled Karin thanks so much thank you support for the business report provided by New Jersey American Water we keep life flowing online at newjerseyamwater.com [Music]