Arrest in UGA-Notre Dame ticket probe; broker’s deal left many fans irate, ticketless

A man was jailed Friday in connection with a college football online ticket deal that left several University of Georgia fans without tickets even after they paid the man to obtain tickets to last weekend’s Georgia-Notre Dame game.

The rare matchup between the two football powers was last weekend in South Bend, Indiana, home of the Fighting Irish, and was one of the toughest-to-get tickets ever for a UGA road game.

Putnam County sheriff’s officials on Friday searched the Lake Forest Drive home of Jeffrey Martin Cook in Eatonton and later arrested him.

Cook, 55, was charged with selling sports tickets without a license and advertising sports tickets for sale without posting a license number in his advertisements, Putnam Sheriff Howard Sills said in an email.

“We are actively continuing our investigation of the undelivered UGA-Notre Dame tickets as we go through the evidence we seized at his home,” Sills said in the email.

Cook has since been released on bond.

Reached by phone on Saturday, Sills said his office had received about 30 complaints from people across the region who had paid to acquire tickets from Cook. Cook was thought to himself have ordered or tried to order as many as 300 tickets to the game with plans to resell them, Sills said.

The sheriff said some of the people received their tickets and that those who didn’t, in some cases, were refunded.

Sills said Cook probably would not be charged with theft if he refunds the people who paid for but didn’t get tickets. The sheriff, however, said his investigators were looking into Cooks records to make sure Cook didn’t sell more tickets than he ordered, which could prove fraudulent.

“He sold a lot of tickets,” Sills said. “But it may not be as bad as we thought.”

This story was originally published September 16, 2017 at 3:36 PM with the headline "Arrest in UGA-Notre Dame ticket probe; broker’s deal left many fans irate, ticketless."