A huge fan of WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark was eager to get tickets to see the professional basketball player play against the Chicago Sky in June, but when she tried to redeem her tickets, something went wrong.
When she found herself more than $1,000 in debt, she reached out to NBC 5 Responds for help.
“When Caitlin Clark declared for the WNBA, I pulled over on the road and went on one of the apps and got tickets to the Sky right away,” said the superfan, who we’ll call Jackie to protect her privacy.
She said she immediately went to the retail site Tick Pick and purchased four tickets to see the Fever play the Sky. She paid a total of $600.
The tickets were transferred from Tick Pick to her Ticketmaster account, which is standard practice, and everything seemed fine until she got to the game.
“I scanned all four tickets and they appeared as if they didn’t work,” Jackie said.
Stunned, she went to the Ticketmaster counter to ask for help.
“[The ticket agent] “He said, ‘Oh, it looks like you transferred all your tickets last week.’ And I said, ‘To who, because I haven’t been on my account.’ And he said, ‘Well, there’s no way to get that back, because you already transferred them to other people.’
But Jackie said she hadn’t transferred her tickets to anyone and that she thought her Ticketmaster account had been hacked. But she didn’t want to leave the game without seeing Clark play, so she asked Ticketmaster what her options were.
“The ticket guy said, ‘We have tickets available, you should buy them.’ So we bought them,” Jackie said.
Their new seats for the Fever-Sky game were much worse and much more expensive, at $1,300.
After the game, Jackie said she called Tick Pick and Ticketmaster several times and was eventually promised a refund by Ticketmaster.
But Jackie said Ticketmaster mistakenly sent her a $129 refund for a comedy show instead of her lost Fever tickets. That’s when she reached out to NBC 5 Responds for help.
We have contacted both companies regarding his situation.
Tick Pick told NBC 5 Responds that they have no control over the “cybersecurity practices of the major ticketing platform” and that Jackie should get help from Ticketmaster.
A Ticketmaster representative told us that Jackie’s Ticketmaster account was likely compromised by a bad actor in an isolated incident.
The company said it is refunding Jackie the $1,350 she paid for replacement tickets to the game as a “one-time courtesy.” It is also replacing her Green Bay Packers season tickets, as it cannot know whether those tickets were also compromised in the hack.
Jackie isn’t sure this is an “isolated incident.” Last month, two data breaches within the company made headlines.
In May, Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, confirmed that hackers had obtained the names and credit card details of more than 500 million Ticketmaster customers. Two weeks later, another breach was announced, but the company did not disclose how many customers were affected by that incident. Ticketmaster has since offered affected customers 12 months of free identity monitoring.
“I had no idea what happened,” Jackie said. “And they didn’t contact anyone to change my password, or I would have done it immediately.”
Jackie has since secured her account and is happy to have NBC 5 Responds help her get her money back, a total of $1,352.
Ticketmaster also told us that if you purchased tickets through a third-party site like Tick Pick, you must go through the third party to get a refund.
Here are some key points to remember:
- Prevent ticket theft by regularly changing your password for any websites or ticketing accounts you have.
- Set up two-factor authentication on your accounts. That way, if someone figures out your password, they won’t be able to log into your account unless they have access to your phone.
