The tour is announced, the presale is just around the corner and suddenly your email inbox is packed with ticket alerts, fan club opportunities and exclusive deals. For very excited fans, it seems like the best time to buy a ticket but it’s also when scam artists capitalize on the rush.
Hot ticket sales drive high demand and quick sell-outs. Cybercriminals take advantage by sending emails and messages pretending to be ticket brokers, fan clubs, or ticket sellers. Those Fake ticket alerts can cost you hundreds of dollars if you get caught, so here’s how to avoid them.
1. Fake Pre-sale and Fan Club Invitations
A hacker could send an email saying you’ve got early access or give you an exclusive presale code that looks just as real. They could include a genuine company logo and colors, and build a website that looks like the real ticketing site.
The URL may be a fake login page asking for your password or payment info. If in doubt, check presale info directly on the artist’s website or from a verified ticketing partner before you enter any info. Never assume you’re on a first-come, first-served list just because you’re invited.
2. Fake Order Confirmations and Payment Failures
The third trick is when you receive an email saying your ticket purchase has been confirmed, canceled, or blocked because a payment couldn’t be made. It might be sent by someone you haven’t bought anything from and can cause enough panic to click through.
Some emails will take you to a fake payment page, while some emails will prompt you to confirm your account details to ‘redeem’ a purchase. If an email mentions a purchase you don’t recognize, don’t click any links or open unexpected attachments; instead, go to the relevant website.
3. Urgent Ticket Account Warnings
These warnings, such as ‘your account has been frozen’, ‘your account has been stolen’, or ‘your account has been locked’, use scare tactics to push you to respond immediately and without due consideration. For instance, ‘you need to change your password now or you’ll lose all your tickets’.
File a security report if you find an actual security incident; investigate on your own. Access the ticketing service through its official app or website, manually enter the URL, and check your account notifications. Reset your password and turn on 2FA if you think that your account has been hacked.
4. Resale Offers From Strangers
If tickets go on sale and are snapped up so quickly, tweets and direct messages from friends with excess tickets might seem too good to be true. It could be if that account is new, or if that offer comes from a stolen or unfamiliar account.
Watch out for sellers who request payment by gift card, wire transfer, or other forms with limited recourse. Remember, a screenshot isn’t a real ticket. Check whether the ticket-selling site has a secure transfer process and follow its resale instructions.
5. Fake Ticket Websites and Cloned Listings
Fake websites will be created by scammers, which will claim to have tickets for sale that offer descriptions of seat locations, countdown clocks and apparently genuine check-out procedures. A convincing appearance does not mean the seller can be trusted.
Double-check everything (website address, seller information and steps to pay). Double-check the event details against the original advert, and never click links in an unexpected message or advert. If it seems too good to be real, just wait before you pay.
Warning Signs Every Fan Should Know
Look for these red flags before replying to an email or answering a message about a ticket:
- Unwanted interaction: You receive an email, tip, or notice (such as a presale invite, an order verification, a safety and security notice, and so on) that you didn’t request. ‘
- Pressure to act immediately: I hear that it will cancel if I don’t do something today or in a few minutes
- Suspicious URLs/Addresses: The domain appears to be slightly different than the real website or the email address of the sender contains typos.
- Complicated payment instructions: The seller asks you to pay through gift cards, wire transfer, or a new payment app you are not familiar with.
- Very low prices: prices are really low, lower than anywhere else without a full explanation.
- Irregularities: misspellings, logo discrepancies, strange language, incomplete seller information.
There’s no single way to identify a scammer, but if you check off a few of the scam warning signs below, it’s worth taking time to investigate what’s really going on.
How to Buy Tickets Safely
There are some very simple things to do to make buying tickets more secure:
- Check the source: Use the artist’s official website and link through to their official ticketing partner. Type the URL directly, not through deceptive messages.
- Consider protected payment: Pay by credit card or another protected payment method, where available and suitable. Confirm with the card issuer that you will have the same rights to a refund and dispute as you would with a credit card.
- Set resale policies: after a purchase, be aware of the policy for resale or exchanges of the tickets via the ticketing or the venue.
- Protect your account: set a long, unique, and hard-to-guess password that you don’t use anywhere else. Enable two-factor authentication if it is available.
- All receipts: Save all receipts and confirmation e-mails of your online purchases. Take screenshots of the listing and seller.
The FTC has more online shopping guidance for consumers on how to verify sellers and keep your payments safe.
Keep Your Ticket Emails Separate
When one email address is doing it all — banking, work, shopping, subscriptions, and every fan club, all those messages about tickets and showtimes quickly get lost in the mix. If your address gets caught in a data breach or sold to marketers, you’ll get a lot more convincing phishing attempts from people you’ve never heard of.
A practical approach is to set up a dedicated private email address, more exactly for tickets, fan clubs, and entertainment registrations. You can use other email services for this purpose as well, which makes it easier to organize confirmations and notice unexpected messages.
A different address won’t stop phishing and it won’t ensure scam emails are blocked. Even if you have your own ticket inbox, always look carefully at the sender address, payment links and payment requests.
Your Next On-Sale Day Checklist
Here are the Takeaways before we count down:
- Check again on the actual site.
- Verify the web address on the page before you log in or pay.
- Don’t be tempted to rush into buying or accepting resale offers that are too cheap.
- Change your password and turn on two-factor authentication.
- Retain receipts and confirmation orders.
If you suspect ticket scams happening within the US, you should report it via the FTC’s official fraud reporting website. When in other areas, report the person to the consumer protection agency and, if applicable, report the listing or account on the site.
A great concert experience begins before you’re seated. Do a little research before you buy tickets to keep your money, your account, and your love of music safe.
Thomas Miller is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Seat42F, covering television, movies and streaming entertainment. He launched Seat42F in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades covering the entertainment industry.
