Photo Credit: Microsoft Copilot
Live music fans all over the country are reporting that their purchased tickets are disappearing from their Ticketmaster accounts. One couple in Denver had no luck resolving the issue until they got in contact with a local news outlet.
One Denver resident purchased tickets from Ticketmaster for both an Eagles and a Garth Brooks show in Las Vegas. After spending thousands on flights, a hotel, rental car, and tickets for The Eagles show at The Sphere, the couple noticed a week before the trip that the tickets were missing.
“This is very extravagant for us,” Annette Barsick told Denver local news outlet 9News. “But I was just like, it’s a once in a lifetime trip. Let’s just do it.” Barsick says she woke up to numerous emails from Ticketmaster stating that the tickets she bought were transferred to someone named Jack in The Netherlands.
“I looked in my Apple Wallet, and my tickets were gone. I was like wait, what? I immediately checked my Ticketmaster account, and sure enough, my tickets were claimed by some stranger,” Barsick says. “[Ticketmaster’s representative] said he had thousands of calls similar to mine in the last two weeks—and that it was not unusual,” Barsick continues.
There are numerous such cases reported by local news outlets all over the United States. A man in Florida had his Morgan Wallen tickets stolen. A woman in San Francisco lost six pre-sale tickets for the New Kids on the Block residency in Las Vegas. The Ticketmaster representative who spoke to Barsick said scammers have been hacking into people’s email accounts and transferring their tickets.
Ticketmaster suggests fans update their passwords, using a unique password for individual accounts like email and the Ticketmaster website. “Especially for their personal email, which is where we often see security issues originate,” a Ticketmaster spokesperson told Digital Music News. “Ticketmaster is constantly investing in new security enhancements to safeguard fans.”
But Barsick says she received no notification checking to see if she was transferring the tickets. “All they had to do was text me and ask if I was trying to transfer these tickets. They’re allowing this to happen, they know it’s happening, and they’re not doing enough to make security better,” Barsick told 9News. Minutes after 9News reached out to Ticketmaster about Barsick’s stolen tickets, they were recovered and transferred back to her account.
Ticketmaster controls more than 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. Earlier this year the service was hacked, with the hacker group dropping a tranche of Ticketmaster tickets to shows like Taylor Swift to prove the intrusion.
While Ticketmaster is pointing at poor personal security habits for these disappearing tickets, those same hackers shared a tutorial online for how they reverse engineered Ticketmaster’s SafeTix. SafeTix are supposed to keep concertgoers safe by rotating barcodes inside the Ticketmaster app.
