Some Ticketmaster customers are experiencing a mysterious situation where expensive concert tickets they purchased are being transferred from their accounts without their permission.
According to NBC Bay Area, which spoke to users of the ticket-buying platform, many reported logging into their accounts and noticing that the tickets they had purchased had disappeared, having been transferred to people they did not know.
“I started freaking out,” a person identified as Nick told the publication. “We got tickets for Imagine Dragons for our son, and Taylor Swift for our daughter. She’s eight years old and a huge Swiftie.”
Image of the Ticketmaster logo on a mobile phone.
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“Indeed, my tickets are gone,” he shared with NBC. “For both Imagine Dragons and Taylor Swift. And as you can imagine, expensive tickets… we’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars. I saw my tickets for sale on StubHub. I say this to customer service and [they said]’There’s nothing we can do.’ ”
A Ticketmaster representative tells PEOPLE in a statement, “Overall, our digital ticketing innovations have greatly reduced fraud compared to the days of paper tickets and duplicate PDFs. Having that digital history is also how we can investigate the situation and return tickets to fans in almost anyway.”
They added: “Fraudsters are looking for new scammers in every industry, and tickets will always be a target because they are valuable, so Ticketmaster is constantly investing in new security improvements to keep fans safe.”
While NBC noted that Nick and some other customers were able to claim their tickets through conversations with Ticketmaster, others apparently had different experiences.
“If you haven’t updated your account recently and you’re using a password that you use in a lot of different places, they can get into your account,” Dan Wall, EVP at Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, told NBC in a statement.
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Ticketmaster.
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To prevent ticket theft, Ticketmaster tells PEOPLE customers should set “a strong, unique password for all accounts — especially your personal email, where we often see security issues arise.”
This isn’t the first time Ticketmaster’s security has been called into question recently. In April 2024, the company suffered a data breach, which they later confirmed in a supporting document about the incident. There, officials wrote: “We are in the process of notifying relevant customers either by email or first class mail. If no one contacts you, we don’t believe your sensitive information is involved.”
Other information stolen at the time included “encrypted credit card information as well as some other personal information provided to us,” Ticketmaster said.
Ticketmaster Senior Vice President Kaitlyn Henrich said in September Today April breach that “Ticketmaster invests more in security and verification than the rest of the industry combined.” She also noted that “passwords for people’s Ticketmaster accounts were not compromised” and that “the unauthorized activity was limited to a third-party database.”
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education