A K-pop festival cancelled three days before it was due to start left buyers waiting for a refund that never fully arrived. Poland's regulator opened a file to work out how much was missing, and ended up passing the case to prosecutors.
What happened
SOUND IN COLORS x K-POP EXPOSÉ was due to take place on 15 and 16 August 2026 at the TAURON Park Śląski in Chorzów. It was cancelled on 12 August, three days before opening, after several artists' agencies announced their withdrawal; the group ATEEZ was among those who pulled out.
In mid-August, the organisers announced they would refund the money within 30 days, via the same payment method. The deadline passed, and some buyers still hadn't been paid.
UOKiK, Poland's competition and consumer protection authority, opened a «postępowanie wyjaśniające» — a preliminary inquiry — on 7 September 2026 to establish how the refund process was progressing, how many buyers were still waiting, and how much was owed. On 28 September it passed the information to the Łódź Regional Prosecutor's Office to assess whether fraud had occurred.
innPoland adds that on 10 August, even before the cancellation, UOKiK had already requested explanations and documentation about the event's organisation and ticket sales. According to WP Finanse, by 7 September the regulator had received more than 110 consumer complaints, the referral to prosecutors was made to assess a possible fraud offence under Article 286 of the Polish Criminal Code, and the company responsible for the Polish side of the event, which operated under the K-POP EXPOSÉ brand, is Tower Group Communications, based in Łódź. The same outlet puts the unrefunded amount at around 1.69 million złoty, but that figure comes from its own survey of 1,431 respondents, not an official UOKiK figure.
There is no penalty. What there is, is an open preliminary inquiry and a referral to prosecutors for assessment.
Why it matters
This reads as a consumer case, and it is one. Seen from the organiser's side, it's something else. In a festival, ticket money comes in months before the event, and production spending is committed over that same stretch, so a cancellation three days out doesn't leave a customer-service problem: it leaves a cash-flow problem. That's why the first thing UOKiK had to investigate was how much was owed — because the amount hadn't even been established.
The telling detail is the one from 10 August. The regulator was already requesting documentation before the festival was cancelled: once an artist withdrawal becomes public, the consumer file doesn't wait for the breach to happen.
And the final trigger wasn't administrative. Once the refund deadline passed, what remained was the criminal route. It's the opposite end of the spectrum from UOKiK's case against Live Nation: there, the dispute was over the terms of the sales regulations; here, it's whether the money still exists at all. For anyone organising an event in Poland, that gets decided earlier — in the impreza masowa permit and in a refund policy that spells out who pays, with what backing, and within what deadline.