Tickets for Taylor Swift Eras Tour concerts are not easy or cheap. For fans of the superstar who manage to snag tickets, the thought of losing them never crosses their minds. But that’s exactly what’s happening to Swifties across the country, as hackers target Ticketmaster accounts, stealing customers’ tickets to resell on other sites.
“It was like a gut punch,” Morgen Bernius, a Maryland mother, told CBS News national consumer correspondent Usher Qurashi, describing the moment she discovered that the Taylor Swift tickets she had purchased for his daughter had suddenly disappeared from his Ticketmaster account.
“The tickets are gone, gone,” Bernius said, adding that she could cry just thinking about it. “It was devastating,” she added.
Ticketmaster won’t say how many people have had their tickets stolen, Qurashi reported, but stories of ticket thefts similar to Bernius’ have spread on social media over the past month. “I woke up and my tickets had been successfully transferred,” another theft victim said, using air quotes.
“The #1 tip I could give fans to protect themselves is to make sure they have a secure, unique password that they don’t use on other platforms,” Kaitlyn Henrich , global head at Live Nation Entertainment, parent company of Ticketmaster, told Qurashi.
Asked if the company had let its customers down, Henrich added: “We’re constantly working to look at what’s happening and improve the experience. »
For now, that experience includes an average wait of 48 hours for fans to find their tickets after notifying the company of their disappearance. As an added precaution, Ticketmaster limits ticket transfers to 72 hours prior to Eras Tour concerts and requires two-factor authentication for certain transactions.
“It’s a very small percentage, less than a tenth of a percent,” Henrich said, “but obviously for the fan who’s going through this, it’s a really stressful situation.”
Online ticket thefts also harm those who unknowingly purchase stolen tickets.
Karen Perry, who paid more than $4,000 for two tickets on StubHub to attend the Eras tour in New Orleans, received an email from TicketMaster just weeks before the show informing her that her tickets had been stolen and would be returned to the original purchaser.
“The tickets transferred to you were acquired by someone attempting to steal tickets. As a result, they have been canceled and returned to the original ticket holder,” the letter states.
“My heart sank, my stomach sank,” Perry told Qurashi. “I was at work and immediately started crying.”
StubHub claims that Ticketmaster never informed them of customer thefts, which it only learned about through media reports.
“I think if there was a world where, for example, we saw Ticketmaster being more collaborative or more transparent about the problems they’re having and how they’re trying to solve those problems, we could be a partner. in this effort,” StubHub’s Laura Dooley told Qurashi.
What can you do to protect yourself
Experts say there are several steps ticket buyers can take to reduce the chances of getting scammed.
- Check early and often to make sure your tickets are still in your account and have not been transferred.
- Buy from sellers who offer replacement or refund guarantees.
- Take screenshots of all your purchases.
As for Perry, who unknowingly purchased stolen tickets on StubHub, she was able to find new seats with the company’s help and was able to catch Swift in action in mid-October.
“We just had the best night of our lives,” Perry said. “Hands down. It was better than our wedding. It was so good.”
