Better Business Bureau serving Canton Region and Greater West Virginia offers tips and advice for consumers to avoid fraudulent practices.
Concerts are back! Bands are touring again, and ticket spending is back to pre-COVID-19 levels. This fact has not gone unnoticed by scammers, though. Recent reports to BBB.org/ScamTracker indicate that con artists are preying on concertgoers by pretending to represent popular ticket seller, Ticketmaster.
How the scam works
You are looking to buy tickets to an upcoming concert or need to transfer tickets for a show that was postponed due to COVID-19. You do an internet search for your question, which brings up results for Ticketmaster. You click through to the website, and everything looks normal.The website prompts you to enter your personal information and a credit card number. However, as soon as you complete a transaction, you notice some suspicious activity. You might receive tickets with someone else’s name on them, or you may never receive your tickets at all. In other cases, you get the tickets, but the site charges you a much higher rate than advertised.Upon closer inspection, you realize you were not on the Ticketmaster site at all! It was a lookalike site with a similar name, such as “TicketSmarter” or “TicketFaster.” When you call the customer service number, they are either unreachable, unhelpful, or downright aggressive.One ticket buyer reported this experience: “They sent me two tickets with someone else’s…
