Many fans said their concert tickets mysteriously disappeared from their Ticketmaster accounts in recent weeks, costing some ticket holders thousands of dollars
A family in Gig Harbor, Washington, told local news station KIRO 7 that they lost more than $1,200 in 14 tickets. Virginia Lasky described how, while preparing for work, she received several emails from Ticketmaster, indicating that tickets for upcoming shows and musical routes had been transferred to someone else’s account
“When I clicked on the ticket, I saw that one by one, it was all transferred and accepted,” explained Lasky, emphasizing that the ticket ended up in a stranger's account
A similar story happened to a woman in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whose tickets to a Pink concert were transferred without her consent. Amanda Shaffer told WGAL News 8 she received the tickets as a Christmas gift from her husband last December.
“Then this morning I woke up to an email that said, ‘Hey, your referral to this person was successful,’” Shaffer said, confused. “And I thought, ‘Wait. Sorry. what?'"
The tickets were reportedly transferred to an account labeled “bdbddh”, and when he searched for his original seats on Ticketmaster he discovered they were being resold under “verified resale”.
In Connecticut, Blaine Heck reported that two $3,500 Taylor Swift tickets were stolen from his account. He said someone hacked into his Ticketmaster account to get the tickets. Fortunately, MarketWatch contacted Ticketmaster and got them back within hours. Similarly, an Indiana resident faced a similar problem when his Swift ticket went missing. After repeated attempts to reach Ticketmaster, he contacted TV station WTHR, who only reinstated his ticket after an intervention.
These incidents of Ticketmaster account breaches follow a huge data breach earlier this year. Hacker group ShinyHunters claimed to have infiltrated the Ticketmaster system and gained access to about 1.3 terabytes of data including names, addresses, credit card numbers, phone numbers and payment information of about 560 million customers worldwide The hack is reported for sale on the dark web, with an asking price of $500,000. 000 was the value.
The breach led to a class action lawsuit alleging that Live Nation and Ticketmaster failed to implement adequate cybersecurity measures, denying them access to the confidential information of current and past customers
Though it reportedly affected the accounts of more than half a billion users, Ticketmaster assured KIRO 7 that user passwords were not compromised, saying that most of these cases were caused by fraudsters going through fans’ email accounts so get the road
In addition, Ticketmaster is currently facing an antitrust lawsuit involving its parent company Live Nation, brought by the Department of Justice, 39 states and the District of Columbia The suit seeks to dismantle two business claims cooperative and anticompetitive actions.
