Ticket Scam

Imagine wanting to purchase tickets to a popular concert, play, special venue, or even a sporting event but it is sold out. What do you do next? You resort to resale tickets and that’s when scammers can take advantage of the high demands for those tickets. Wanting to pay more for the original ticket value is one thing but paying more and getting fake tickets could be a nightmare. You might not even find out till you get to the venue and discovered that you can’t get in since you don’t have real tickets.

Scammers are good at creating counterfeit tickets with forged barcodes and logos of real ticket companies. You also might run into the chance of buying legitimate tickets but just sold to multiple buyers. It will be a luck game of who uses those tickets first. A more serious scam would involve pretending to sell tickets for the purpose of stealing your identify or credit card information.

There are several options to report a ticket scam.

• Contact your state consumer protection office.
• Contact the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) using the Online Complaint Assistant.
• File a local police report especially if you met the scammer in person and have a picture to give to law enforcement.
• File a complaint about a ticket company using the Better Business Bureau’s Scam Tracker.
• If you paid by credit card, report the problem to the card company. You may be able to dispute the ticket purchase.