A Vancouver man is out hundreds of dollars after being scammed by fake concert tickets on craigslist.
Mike McCartney says he desperately wanted to take his wife to the Pink concert in October, but tickets sold out within hours.
Faced with no other option, he logged onto to the popular classified website craigslist and contacted a man selling a pair of tickets for $400.
“I even went online to get some tips on how to make sure you are buying real tickets, like getting hard tickets and meeting in person.”
McCartney agreed to meet the man at Pacific Centre on Tuesday to complete the transaction and paid in cash.
The seller, who was in his mid-to-late 20s and goes by the name Kevin, gave him a copy of the original receipt.
He says everything seemed legitimate.
“I’ve been to hundreds of concerts, and they looked completely legitimate,” says McCartney.
“I don’t usually buy tickets on craigslist; I go to a ton of concerts so I am kind of embarrassed this happened to me.”
The next day, he says he couldn’t shake a bad feeling that something was fishy with the tickets.
McCartney logged back onto craigslist, and noticed the tickets he bought were still up for sale.
He then took the tickets to Ticketmaster, who said they looked legitimate but couldn’t tell for sure since he was not the original purchaser and didn’t have the confirmation code.
McCartney started to do some research online and came across Global News coverage of a similar ticket scam involving One Direction tickets in mid-July.
In that case, several people – mostly teenaged girls – were scammed.
Vancouver Police started investigating and a 16-year-old girl was arrested. It’s not clear if she was ever charged.
In a bizarre coincidence, McCartney realized that the serial number and the event ID on his Pink tickets matched the serial number on the fake One Direction tickets in the Global News story.
It turns out that authentic Pink tickets have a completely different serial number.
McCartney thinks it’s possible a batch of fake tickets are circulating.
“It seems like someone may have a friend at Ticketmaster who got a hold of a bunch of blank tickets, and they are printing them,” he says.
McCartney says he texted the seller and told him “I know these are fake, give me my money back and I’ll give you the tickets back.”
The ad was taken down from craigslist 10 minutes later.
McCartney says he has contacted Vancouver Police but wanted to tell his story to ensure no one else gets scammed.
He says Vancouver Police told him that several other people have filed complaints about the same ticket seller.
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