MileyWorld Settles Complaints

Pennsylvania members of Miley Cyrus’ official fan club will get the opportunity to extend their MileyWorld.com memberships following a recent settlement with site operator Interactive Media Marketing and the state attorney general’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

In the leadup to the teen sensation’s swing through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in early 2008, fan club members began lodging complaints with the AG’s office regarding ticket sales for the “Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds” tour.

It seems many fan clubbers who ponied up $29.95 to join the site in 2007 reportedly did so to gain access to pre-sale codes for tickets to the concerts, but soon discovered that there were no tickets left to be had.

According to a statement by AG Tom Corbett, the site “failed to inform consumers that all ‘pre-sale’ tickets were sold within the first 15 minutes of their offering to fan club members” and “allegedly continued to sell memberships to new consumers, and continued to provide ‘pre-sale’ codes, after all tickets had been sold – without informing consumers that their membership codes would be useless.”

Interactive Media must pay $10,000 in civil penalties and $10,000 to support future public protection activities, the statement said, as well as extend fan club memberships an additional four months to nearly 1,000 Pennsylvania consumers who joined the club during the pre-sale period but were unable to secure tickets.

The MileyWorld.com Web site must also post a notice in the event of future pre-sales that purchase of a membership does not guarantee access to tickets.

“The crux of our complaint was that it is important for consumers to get all the information up front,” a spokesman for Corbett told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Along with the Pennsylvania settlement, a class action filing in Tennessee against Interactive Media was settled out of court recently, and will include two additional months of free membership on the site to class members, the Tribune-Review reported.