Taylor Swift fans are being warned of ticket scams ahead of her Australian tour later this month. Scammers are using social media to target desperate fans often hacking into people's accounts to sell fake tickets. In Victoria alone, police have received hundreds of reports of scams which have seen the victims lose more than 260-thousand dollars.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 Many people are very desperate to get tickets and they are, I think, starting to troll through
00:06 social media, they're looking online, trying to see what's available, and sadly that is
00:10 exactly where the scammers are lurking. So they are basically posting, you know, fake
00:15 profiles, they are saying they have tickets to sell when no such tickets exist, and people
00:20 are sadly falling for that.
00:22 Are there any other examples of how this is working?
00:26 I think the critical thing is that the scammers are really very good at trying to suss out
00:32 where are people's vulnerabilities. So they know that there aren't very many tickets available,
00:37 they know that people are desperate to attend, and so what they're trying to do is actually
00:42 put themselves in front of people who have cash to spend. They are creating profiles
00:47 themselves online, so for example, they may impersonate one of your friends, they may
00:53 then pose as that friend saying, "Oh, it's really sad, I can no longer go to the concert,
00:58 and who would like to buy my tickets?" So they really try to get in front of people
01:02 in a trusting way so that they can gain your trust and then get access to your cash.
01:08 And so how are they impersonating friends? Are they actually, for example, creating a
01:12 Facebook profile with a photo that they've picked up, which of a friend of someone that
01:20 they know is looking for a ticket?
01:22 Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes this will come from very standard Facebook profile impersonations.
01:29 So many people may download a photo of you online, start to put out a profile, and try
01:34 to hook in as many people who believe that that's an actual profile, and then simply
01:39 posting notices that they have tickets available. Other people will actually perhaps engage
01:45 with you, maybe over Facebook Marketplace, for example, and what they want to do is then
01:50 get access to your personal information. They may ask you to send along a piece of ID to
01:55 prove or to go along with your credit card details. They will then use that identity
02:00 in other forums in order to scam other people.
02:03 Ah, right. And will they also use your details to buy other goods and not just dupe you out
02:10 of the Taylor Swift tickets?
02:12 Absolutely. Once they've got your information, they can go wild with it. And in some cases,
02:18 they can actually use your genuine photo to pose as you and almost then hook other people
02:25 in and they think you're the one that's scamming them.
02:28 Yeah, it's so easy to get sucked into this, isn't it?
02:30 Correct.
02:31 So what are the key messages for people not to get sucked into these?
02:37 The number one message is that there's only one authorised reseller, and that is the Ticketek
02:42 Marketplace. So if you are desperate and you're really wanting to get Taylor Swift tickets,
02:47 you've got to be looking on that site. Don't trust anything else. If it's too good to be
02:52 true, it definitely is. You don't want to be giving your money to a stranger online,
02:57 even if you think that it's someone you can trust.
02:59 And yes, scammers love big events like this.
03:02 Absolutely. There's big money in this. You know, I was saying to someone earlier, it's
03:07 not the same as, you know, down the pub $20 event. This is big ticket cost and thousands
03:13 of people are looking for tickets online. I read one report that said that at any given
03:18 moment on the Ticketek Marketplace, there can be 50,000 people looking for tickets.
03:23 So even getting through that, there's a long line up. I was on today just trying to see
03:28 what it looked like. Even getting past the door and into the marketplace is actually
03:32 very challenging.
03:34 And Lisa, are you a Swifty and have you already got a ticket?
03:39 I don't have a ticket. I was not, when tickets went on sale, I was sort of saying, I'm not
03:44 really a Swifty, but now I'm actually really excited about it. And I think maybe I should
03:49 have gotten one as well.
03:50 [BLANK_AUDIO]