‘Perfect scam’: Taylor Swift tickets stolen from Regina woman’s account

It was a Taylor Swift fan’s worst nightmare.

Regina’s Hayley Park said her Ticketmaster account was hacked and her tickets were transferred to someone else.

“It’s heartbreaking for my daughter,” she said. “It’s not something you should have to go through.”

Park checked her email last week and saw an email from Ticketmaster that read: “Your ticket transfer to Janie is on the way.”

She said her heart immediately sank. Park doesn’t know anyone named Janie, and didn’t recognize the email the tickets were transferred to.

“I think my account did get hacked,” Park said. “I think that the Taylor Swift tickets are probably a prime target for this because the resale value is so great.”

The two stolen tickets were to Taylor Swift’s sold-out Eras Tour show in Toronto this November.

Park immediately reached out to Ticketmaster’s virtual chat assistant. She chatted with an agent who said her request could take five to seven business days.

“I was a little shocked at that, because I’m thinking in five to seven business days, these tickets could be sold five times over,” she said.

Park was optimistic that Ticketmaster would sort things out. She reassured her daughter of this, too.

“I am trusting that Ticketmaster will make it right, and that’s what I keep telling her,” she said. “We’ve done everything we can on our end. There’s nothing that we did wrong to cause this. It’s not our fault.”

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Luckily that optimism paid off. Park got her tickets back on Sept. 17, just over a week after the tickets were stolen.

“It was surprisingly easy once I got in touch with Ticketmaster,” she said.

Park heard from the Ticketmaster fraud department team. The agent told her that the tickets were back in her account with a new barcode, and the person who transferred the tickets had their account frozen.

The agent told her to change her Ticketmaster password, and the password of the email associated with the account.

“Other than that there is nothing that I could do or that anybody could do differently,” Park said. “That’s the best method of protection for yourself — having two different passwords for those separate accounts.”

However, Park said that Ticketmaster needs to do a better job of protecting ticket buyers.

“My product was held in their possession,” she said. “These tickets are all digital. You can’t print them off anymore. You can’t get them mailed to you anything like that. So I didn’t have a choice of how else to safeguard myself from something like this.”

Park advises other Ticketmaster users to be vigilant and use a strong password.

“I feel like this is a perfect scam for somebody to grab these high-end concert tickets that people want because the resale value is so high,” Park said.

Now Park and her daughter can go back to planning their outfits and making friendship bracelets for the sure to be enchanted evening.

“We’re gonna celebrate all the eras, all the albums,” she said. “We’re working on a jean jacket with her, and we have patches coming in the mail.”

A Ticketmaster spokesperson told 980 CJME that “fans should be aware unauthorized ticket transfers are often a result of poor password management, like using the same password across multiple websites.”

It suggests to use a strong, unique password for Ticketmaster accounts, like you would use for a bank account.

Ticketmaster tells fans to reach out to them if they suspect they’ve been hacked.

READ MORE:

• Sask. woman loses $500 to Taylor Swift ticket Facebook scam
• ‘Grandparent scams’ pop up again in Saskatoon, Moose Jaw: Police
• Sask. residents lost $3.4 million in cryptocurrency frauds this year: RCMP