Does your friend sell Taylor Swift tickets? Make sure it’s not a hacker

As Taylor Swift embarks on the Canadian leg of her Eras world tour, scammers are taking advantage of the insatiable demand for tickets to the sold-out shows.

“It’s just hard to tell who’s real,” Summer Nickel said.

Nickel, 20, is a long-time fan from Maple Ridge, B.C., and she’s trying to buy resale tickets to one of the three Vancouver shows since they sold out almost immediately last summer. Of the 15 or so attempts to purchase them, every attempt failed.

Scammers prey on the efforts of die-hard Swifties to secure a spot on one of their Canadian shows, often bilking them out of thousands of dollars and leaving them heartbroken and disappointed.

“They are very needy,” Nickel said. “They want you to send the money now.”

Nickel says her mother, who also tried to buy her tickets, almost became a victim because she thought a Facebook friend had posted tickets for sale on his page. It turned out that the account was hacked.

Additionally, Nickel showed CBC News screenshots of a fake account under her own name that was created to scam other people.

“That’s clearly not me looking for tickets,” she said. “It’s just crazy what it’s become.”

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Taylor Swift ticket scammers are aggressively attacking Canadian Swifties

With Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour coming to Canada in just a few weeks, Canadian Swifties are being aggressively targeted by scammers looking to sell them fake tickets for big money. A fan’s Facebook account was hacked by a scammer posing as a friend.

An element of legitimacy

Ritesh Kotak, a cybersecurity and technology analyst in Toronto, says people tend to fall for scams when the seller claims to be a friend because there is a certain level of trust.

“It adds an element of legitimacy,” he said.

“These tickets are a sought-after commodity. There are clearly individuals willing to pay the ultimate price, and hackers and fraudsters will do everything in their power to exploit them.”

Some people whose accounts were hacked told CBC News they tried to report the scam to Facebook and got friends and family to do the same. However, in many cases they said the social media company did not delete the posts or accounts.

“I felt helpless and just so miserable that my name was being used to scam others,” said Sonia Sidhu, a Toronto woman whose Facebook account was hacked last July.

After Swift’s concert tickets sold out, the hacker immediately began posting to Sidhu’s professional and community groups that she had tickets for sale.

She knows at least four people who were scammed, some of up to $1,600. She says people in her network reported the account to Facebook.

Sidhu himself reported it to the police and Facebook about 20 to 30 times, to no avail. The hacked account is still active.

“It’s irresponsible,” she said. “(Facebook) knows these accounts are being hacked. They’re being used to scam people and they don’t care.”

CBC News reached out to Facebook several times for a response but has not received a response.

Due to the rapidly increasing demand for Eras tickets Ticketmaster enforced new rules earlier this monthalthough ticket transfer is only possible within 72 hours of the show. The move came after a spike in reported hacks of Ticketmaster accounts.

However, Toronto police say the best way to avoid fraud is to verify the identity of the seller – perhaps by calling the friend who appears to be selling the tickets. Due to the large volume of fraud reports they receive, police are rarely able to dedicate resources to tracking down fraudsters.

“It’s very, very difficult to ever see this money again,” said Det. David Coffey of the Toronto Police Service’s Financial Crimes Unit.

“It goes beyond the financial loss,” he said. “It’s really the heartache that we’re seeing because it’s the parents who are desperate to buy these tickets for their children, or the children themselves who are desperate to get them.”

Fraud on the rise

According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, only five to ten percent of victims report fraud. However, Acting Customer and Communications Officer Nancy Cahill still encourages people to do so as fraud has increased in recent years.

“People meet online, look for love online and we order online,” Cahill said.

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According to Statistics Canada, fraud cases have almost doubled in the last decade, from 79,000 in 2012 to 150,000 in 2022. The increase shows that fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated and artificial intelligence is helping them, the agency said.

Despite the dangers, Summer Nickel, whose first concert was at the age of seven with Taylor Swift, says she is not giving up her search for tickets.

“I’m pretty desperate. I’m willing to pay a pretty penny for a ticket,” she said.