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Buying Sports or Concert Tickets? Here's How to Avoid Scams

Criminals try to sell fake tickets online. Don't let them ruin your fun

Patrick J. Kiger,

Updated March 14, 2025

AARP

En español

Updated March 14, 2025

a red ticket with admit one written on it

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Suburban Detroit resident Lisa Turner is a veteran concertgoer who’s been to more than 1,000 shows over the past few decades — somehow managing to find tickets to performances by wildly popular artists like Billy Joel, Elton John and the Rolling Stones. So when her teenage daughter was eager to see Taylor Swift, Turner was sure she could score a few seats to one of the star’s two Detroit shows.

First she tried using her credit card’s presale access to tickets — usually a dependable method. But with so many Swifties also on the hunt, she had no luck..

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Next, she talked to various people offering tickets on Facebook, but she wasn’t convinced they were legit.

Finally, as the shows neared, Turner found a seller on Craigslist. When she talked to him on the phone, she said, “He sounded very trustworthy and nice and personable. He didn’t give me any kind of weird vibes or anything.”

Kevin, as he called himself, even offered to send Turner a digital ticket in advance before she paid him so she could check it out. Sure enough, she soon got a notification on her husband’s iPhone, and downloaded “a very realistic-looking ticket” into the Apple Wallet app — which Kevin claimed he needed to use because he got error messages when he used the Ticketmaster app, the usual method.

Satisfied, Turner sent the man a total of $1,200 on an online payment app for four tickets — for her daughter and three friends — for the Friday concert.

But then, on the day of the show, she suddenly started wondering if the deal had been too good to be true. After trying unsuccessfully to verify the tickets online, she finally drove to the stadium box office. That’s where she got the bad news. “Unfortunately, these are not real,” one of the workers there told her, while also noting that the fakes were “the best we have seen.”

Meanwhile, Kevin suddenly vanished, his phone number disconnected.

Increase in use of digital tickets has made buying online risky

Scammers take advantage of the fact that paper tickets are being increasingly replaced by digital tickets purchased online, downloaded into a phone app and then presented for scanning at the arena gate.

While digital ticketing makes it easier for fans, it’s also convenient for criminals. Instead of having to print counterfeit tickets and peddle them on a dark street corner, the scammers can sit at home and post ads for nonexistent tickets on online marketplaces. And it’s relatively easy for scammers, using consumer-grade graphic design software, to create a fake digital ticket with convincing-looking graphics, says Teresa Murray, head of the Consumer Watchdog office for the U.S. PIRG Education Fund.

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They also know that many fans aren’t yet familiar with the technology. If a person hasn’t bought tickets from an online site before, and a seller provides them with a QR code, they may not realize that “there’s really no way to test it until you’re at the gate,” says Josh Planos, a Better Business Bureau (BBB) spokesperson.

How do ticket scams work?

With stars such as Billy Joel, Coldplay, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar on tour this year, demand for seats makes it tempting for people to look in unusual places for tickets and to suspend their suspicions. Those conditions create a perfect situation for scammers, experts say.

You see somebody supposedly selling tickets to this concert that’s sold out, "and your mind starts going in overdrive. You're like, 'Oh boy, I can buy tickets!’ ” explains Murray. “We’ve seen case after case of perfectly intelligent, normally skeptical people who fall for the scam because they get caught up in this euphoria.”

Anti-fraud experts say that ticket scammers often ply their trade on social media and online marketplaces such as Craigslist and Facebook, which have become last-resort options for would-be concertgoers. But some brazen scammers even create entire fake ticket-selling websites of their own.

“There’s a certain portion of reports coming from folks who thought they were buying a ticket from Ticketmaster because it was a site that looked like Ticketmaster,” Planos says. “But they didn’t double-check that URL, and it was a lookalike site.”

Once a ticket scammer convinces a person to purchase a concert ticket, they’ll usually ask the target to send money through a peer-to-peer payment app such as Zelle or Venmo rather than using a credit card, according to Steve Baker, a former Federal Trade Commission official who now publishes the Baker Fraud Newsletter.

That’s when the bad stuff starts to happen. The scammer may send a counterfeit replica of the ticket, or simply disappear without sending anything at all — “a straight theft kind of deal,” as Baker explains.

How to protect yourself from ticket scammers

Some experts recommend that music fans stick to getting their tickets from name-brand sellers such as Ticketmaster, or if they’re going to venture into the resale market, only do business with sellers who belong to the National Association of Ticket Brokers (NATB), an industry group that requires members to follow a code of ethics.

“If you’re dealing with a NATB member, it’s guaranteed, and if they failed to deliver that ticket, it’s not just a refund, you get 200 percent,” explains Gary Adler, NATB’s executive director and counsel.

You can get a list of members at natb.org or at verifiedticketsource.com. The BBB has a page with tips on buying tickets.

Here are some additional safety tips from Teresa Murray at U.S. PIRG.

Always treat someone selling tickets to a hot concert or big sports event with skepticism since these events are likely to be sellouts.
If you do buy from an individual, it should be someone whom you know personally, such as a relative, close friend or coworker.
Unless you know a seller personally, never pay for tickets with a peer-to-peer payment service such as Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, CashApp or a wire transfer. If the person turns out to be a scammer, you won’t be able to get your money back (these apps don’t have the same consumer protections that credit cards do). When you’re buying tickets, check a floor chart to make sure that the section and seat number actually exist.
If you’re buying tickets from a name-brand site such as Ticketmaster or StubHub, make sure that the URL is the correct one, and not for a look-alike site created by a scammer.

What to do if you are a victim of a ticket scam

File a local police report and notify your state attorney general.
Contact the Federal Trade Commission online at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, or by phone at 877-382-4357. Or report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov. Not every complaint leads to enforcement action, but the information can help officials spot trends and sometimes identify the criminals.
The BBB takes reports of consumer scams on their Scam Tracker page.
For support and guidance, the trained fraud specialists at the free AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline, 877 -908-3360, can share information on what to do next and how to avoid future scams. The AARP Fraud Watch Network also offers online group support sessions.

For more on Lisa Turner's experience with a concert ticket scam, tune into this episode of AARP’s podcast The Perfect Scam.

This article, originally published in 2023, has been updated.

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