Well Scammers, Look What You Made Us Do….
The Taylor Swift Eras Tour is undeniably the biggest cultural phenomenon of the decade. Until 2023, Swift hadn’t performed a large-scale tour since 2018, and during the pandemic, her popularity rose even higher due to a string of releases and “Taylor’s Version” recordings.
All of this led to unprecedented demand when The Eras Tour went on sale last fall. Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program was supposed to relieve expected pressure on their system, and allow fans with presale codes access to tickets. Once the Verified Fan sale was over, tickets to the stadium shows would go on sale to the public. Or so, that was the plan.
Instead, Ticketmaster’s system experienced over two billion attempts to access their site. A failure to stagger the Verified Fan on sale by city, bot attacks, and even fans without codes attempting to get tickets all at once. This led to a catastrophic meltdown. Now, having a code didn’t even guarantee you access to tickets. To relieve pressure, Ticketmaster released more seat inventory than expected during the Verified Fan sale, resulting in the shows mostly selling out before the general public could even have access to tickets.
If you were a Swiftie, you had a code and had a chance at snagging tickets, or you didn’t get a chance at all. The demand for access to the shows far exceeded the supply of tickets. This vacuum created by this exclusivity had to be filled somehow. And it was filled by scammers.
Numerous groups started to crop up on Facebook. Ostensibly to connect shut-out Swift fans with ticketholders no longer able to attend the concerts, these groups in reality were created, run by, and filled with scammers. It worked like this: an unsuspecting fan makes a post looking for tickets. A scammer replies in the comment section saying they have tickets to get rid of because a family member is sick, or their wedding has been moved, or other such excuses. The fan and would-be seller begin to DM. The seller sends an easily doctored screenshot or recording of the Ticketmaster app.
The scammer then asks the trusting and excited Swiftie to send money via Zelle, CashApp, or Venmo. Note, the scammers always refuse to accept PayPal Goods and Services, because they have strong buyer protections. After sending the money, the fan is cut off and blocked. The seller has made off with hundreds or even thousands of dollars, leaving the fan with no recourse.
This is a story that has been retold countless times on local news outlets all summer long. Investigative reporters talked with victims who had been swindled out of serious dough for Swift tickets. Some reports even tracked down the folks who had their Facebook accounts hacked and stolen from them by the scammers. That’s one key to earning victims’ trust: having an aged Facebook profile with a documented history of activity from a real person. Once the scammer commandeers it, they try to pass themselves off as the original account holder. It adds legitimacy to the whole operation.
Yours truly here at The Music Universe stumbled into this world earlier this summer. During my investigation, I never once spoke with a legitimate reseller from any of these ticket resale groups. Instead, I was bombarded by scammers.
Keep in mind, that a big part of my job at TMU and elsewhere is to get in touch with people. I have a variety of methods–such as paid lookup services–to do just that. So, when a scammer would send me a Zelle phone number or a Venmo email address, I could easily look up who that account really belonged to and get in touch with that person.
Once I realized how rampant this scamming was for The Eras Tour, I contacted my friend Ben. He’s a YouTube scam baiter with over one million subscribers on his channel Pleasant Green. As he went down this Swift scam rabbit hole, he reached out and asked for TMU’s help with a video, which he just released today. In the video, he talks with victims and even a money launderer that I had found through my scambaiting.
So how can you protect yourself from scammers as you enter your live-Swiftie era and go see her in concert? As a journalist, I can’t officially recommend any other way to obtain tickets than going through the tour’s official point of sales. Be that Ticketmaster in the US and Europe, or Frontier Touring in Australia, or the other ticketing options for the international legs.
However, since I know there are those out there who will be searching other avenues for tickets, here are my personal tips for staying safe.
ONLY buy from insured and bonded secondary market resellers like Stubhub, VividSeats or Seatgeek. The truth is you are risking whether or not the sites will actually have the advertised resale inventory. But in case they don’t, they will either reseat you with alternate inventory or refund your money. The latter may take a while, but these are large companies that have reputations to protect.
If you are going to buy from a reputable third-party reseller, be prepared to pay a pretty penny. You can also go to the venue at showtime and wait for ticket prices to bottom out. Your $600 nosebleed just may turn into a $300 nosebleed at 7:58 right before Taylor hits the stage. At this point, the seller just wants to offload the ticket and recoup the costs.
Never buy from a Facebook group, Reddit thread, or other online community medium. It’s just too risky. In the course of my investigation, I found one woman who was scammed by a person in the US who had a legitimate Facebook profile with their actual picture. They were a con artist who claimed to have tickets that they did not. It’s not just the Nigerian scammers looking to make a buck off of eager and trusting swifties.
The Twitter/X account @ErasTourResell has made national headlines for being a place that connects ticket sellers with fans for face-value exchanges. A ticket gets posted, hundreds of comments are made in reply to the post, and the ETR team facilitates the sale. There are some other strictly-monitored Discord groups, and groups on Facebook like Taylor Swift Southern California, that are legitimate and help assist fans in pointing them in the right direction. But always be wary if someone hits you up in a DM offering tickets for a too-good-to-be-true price. Because it probably is.
This is not the end of our investigation into this underworld ecosystem of people taking advantage of the huge demand for Taylor Swift. There were stunning allegations across social media that venue-hired merch workers were stealing tips from shoppers by keeping the tablet turned towards themselves during the transaction. These workers are accused of engaging in “self-help” by covertly selecting a tip that would sometimes be as high as 50% of the total order.
When buying merch at any concert, always make sure you keep hold of your payment method and have the worker keep the tablet turned towards you until the transaction is complete.
We are reaching out to venues and victims and will have more on the merch story specifically in the near future. For now, please be safe out there. It was a cruel summer for many who got fleeced by these scammers, but hopefully, you’ll be enchanted by a Swift concert soon.
