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Alabama fans take revenge on scalper who sold them counterfeit title tickets
The cliché that revenge is a dish best served cold can apply literally to what two Alabama fans did to a scalper who sold them fake tickets to Monday’s College Football Playoff National Championship game.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Bryant Gentry and his brother allegedly bought two tickets for $1,000 each from Joseph Escalera via Craigslist. But the tickets were fake.
After discovering they were no good, the brothers used different contact info to buy more tickets from Escalera and meet him again Monday afternoon near a restaurant in Ybor City. And they got Escalara arrested after temporarily debilitating him.
But as scalper Joseph Steven Escalera began the transaction, his customer’s two brothers snuck up from behind. One pinned Escalera to his chair, pinching a nerve between his neck and shoulder while holding a long, cold object to the back of his head. The other two took his shoes and socks, as well as six tickets to that night’s game they found tucked in Escalera’s waistband.
The cold object was a bottle of Coca-Cola. The tactic sounds similar to a real-life use of a Vulcan nerve pinch.
For the full story of the family’s ingenuity, click the link above. They took precautions other people would be wise to take when buying tickets from a scalper so they could remember their original seller.
The brothers told the Times that police arrived 10 minutes later. Upon finding their original tickets were fake, the two gave Tampa police a heads up about what had happened.
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Fans in Tampa were constantly warned over the weekend to be on the lookout for fake tickets. It was clear that officials were aware that fakes could be a problem when in Tampa over the weekend; the notices were hard to avoid.
The Gentrys said they barely got back to their hotel to watch the game on TV after the process of Escalera’s arrest was completed. And no, they haven’t gotten their money back. Outside of being out $2,000, not experiencing the heartbreak of Alabama’s loss in-person may not have been the worst thing in the world.
Escalera is facing charges of grand theft.
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Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
