With many popular events selling out in double-quick time, trying to get your hands on a ticket when they first go on sale can be a stressful and frustrating business (hello Glastonbury, Beyoncé and, no doubt, Taylor Swift, whose ticket presale for her 2024 UK dates kicks off on Monday).
Also, not all of us can commit to organising our diary six months or a year in advance.
All is not necessarily lost if you are not successful. However, it pays to be cautious when trying to bag a last-minute ticket for a hot event.
Fortunately, there will always be people who need to sell their tickets nearer the time. But, while using official sales channels won’t leave you out of pocket, the world of ticket resale on social media requires exercising a huge amount of caution, warns Mike Andrews, a coordinator for the National Trading Standards eCrime team. “There’s been a shift in the last few years towards fraudsters targeting people on social media, which has reflected consumer behaviour of more people turning to social media to find tickets,” he says.
In fact, concert ticket scams soared by 529% between March 2022 and February this year, with those defrauded losing an average of £110, according to research by Lloyds Bank.
Scour genuine resale sites
If you are desperate for a ticket but the event is sold out, websites such as Ticketmaster list resale tickets (typically offered by people unable to attend) for many events, and Twickets is arguably the leading resale marketplace. “They offer greater protection if anything was to go wrong,” Andrews says.
Other resale sites include TicketSwap, while the ticket app Dice allows fans to join a waiting list for sold-out gigs.
Too good to be true?
Many people will jump on to social media to scout out tickets for a gig – and there are plenty of genuine sellers using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. However, there are ways to stop yourself falling for increasingly sophisticated scams.
“If it’s too good to be true, it probably is,” Liz Stanton at Get Safe Online, an internet safety website, says. Although she quickly adds that scammers are becoming increasingly savvy.
“They’re more switched on and will drop the price down to a level that doesn’t sound ridiculously obvious that it’s a scam. For example, if Glastonbury tickets are originally £350, they might drop to £320 as they know that putting it at £50 is just having a laugh.”
Check the person’s profile
This is where some of the most obvious warning signs are if you are buying via social media.
“A red flag would be that they have few friends or followers on the platform,” Andrews says.
Scroll through their profile and look at the activity. “If someone has recently set up a profile and put on a week’s worth of pictures, that should raise concerns,” he adds. Sometimes you will spot fake profiles as they will set their location abroad, which might give off a whiff of suspicion. On Twitter, many scammers use random usernames that don’t correlate with their name, and add in emojis and kisses to their username to make them look more approachable. Also, scammers can stick out on Twitter as they often retweet furiously in the days leading up to selling a ticket for a big event – look at their posts and replies to see if there’s any actual engagement with friends or followers.
Also, watch out for people who say “DM me” in their original post and turn off comments. The purpose of this is that they are trying to have multiple conversations with potential victims in their private messages rather than look like the ticket had been bought.
Use ‘reverse image’
“Criminals will ‘scrape’ pictures of tickets online and use the information in the image to add to their own posts,” Andrews says.
However, he adds, there are ways to check if it is legitimate. “You can do a ‘reverse image’ search to see if there are copies of the image on other websites. (For more information on how this works, check out articles such as this.) If you spot others, that would suggest it’s highly suspicious.”
And a word of warning from the experts: to help crack down on this problem, don’t post an image of your own ticket online. Also, you can apply the same approach with the seller’s profile pictures.
“Most scammers use someone else’s pictures, which a reverse image search can sometimes pick up,” Stanton says.
Pay by credit card
Many fraudsters push buyers into paying for tickets via a direct bank transfer, and will come up with all sorts of excuses to get you to do this. “If you use a money transfer service or direct bank transfer, you’re not protected and may not be refunded,” Andrews says.
Whenever you are buying tickets online, make the purchase with a credit card, he adds. “If you can demonstrate to your credit card issuer that you have been defrauded, it should refund you.”
To qualify for protection under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, you have to spend between £100 and £30,000 on your card.
Scammers will sometimes encourage people to pay using PayPal’s friends and family option. However, this doesn’t offer you any protection, as PayPal doesn’t provide refunds for payments made this way.
If you want to use PayPal, only do this via its goods and services option – which will often result in scammers running a mile. This offers protection and provides refunds. Also, you can often spot a scammer when they provide PayPal or bank details, as this will often reveal a different name to the one they are using online.
If you are scammed
Try to take pictures of the conversations as evidence for your refund request. “As soon as the transaction goes through, they will usually block you and delete the conversation; that’s why we say to always screenshot,” Stanton says.
Report and block the fraudsters on the social media platform and report them to Action Fraud, the national fraud reporting centre. Contact your bank as soon as possible to try to stop the transaction and see if you can claim a refund if it has gone though.
