Friend’s Hacked Facebook Account Scammed With Fake Taylor Swift Entries

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The drama surrounding tickets to Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras tour continues: A Montreal woman was recently scammed while trying to help her friends get seats for one of the singer’s shows in November in Toronto.

It was an elaborate ruse: The scammer wasn’t simply advertising tickets they didn’t have, which is a common tactic. In this case, they hacked someone’s Facebook account and posed as that person to scam their friends, who had no idea they were talking to a stranger. The scam appears to be happening globally; Australian police forces warned fans to beware of Facebook friends selling Eras Tour tickets ahead of Swift’s shows in Melbourne and Sydney.

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“There have been reports in New South Wales and Victoria of scammers hijacking social media accounts to scam victims out of Taylor Swift concert tickets,” Sutherland Shire Police Area Command wrote in a Facebook post. “The safest way to purchase tickets is through an authorized ticket seller. If you buy from a friend through social media, contact them independently through a different channel to make sure the offer is legitimate.”

Victoria Police posted that it had become aware of the same ruse, adding that it had received at least 250 reports of scams involving Eras Tour tickets overall since last June.

“Taking advantage of the demand for tickets, scammers target fans with fake ticket sales through social media, often hacking into people’s accounts and then using the profiles to sell fake tickets to the victim’s friends,” he wrote. the force.

Although she’s not a Taylor Swift fan, Amanda Alderman saw her friend post about tickets last week and passed the information on to her colleagues, a group of Montreal nurses, who wanted to attend the show but hadn’t been able to get tickets during the fair. Ticketmaster. sale.

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“Then he came and went; I was the link between the two of them,” Alderman said, adding that he knows the woman whose account he posted about the fines for decades.

Everything seemed fine at first, Alderman said. Speaking in a Messenger chat that Alderman and his friend had previously used, the scammer said they were selling four tickets for $400 each, a price Alderman’s colleagues agreed upon. They sent a wire transfer to an email with a name that didn’t match the seller, which Alderman said he didn’t register as a red flag because he estimated that with a total of four tickets, someone else had made the initial purchase. .

Once the money was accepted, Alderman said the seller asked for contact information to transfer the tickets on Ticketmaster, and then said there appeared to be an additional $50 per person charge for the name change. Alderman decided to pay the fee herself (an additional $200) and ask her friends to reimburse her once they received the tickets.

“Then we waited and then she started taking a little while to respond, so I started getting nervous,” Alderman said. “I wrote to her sister… and she told me ‘this is a scam account.’ “They notified Facebook a week ago and Facebook did not want to delete the account.”

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The post announcing the tickets, dated Feb. 15, was still up Tuesday night. The Montreal Gazette flagged it as a scam, and shortly after noon on Wednesday, an automated “support message” indicated that the platform would not remove it.

“We use a combination of technology and human reviewers to process reports and identify content that goes against our community standards,” the message said. “In this case, we did not remove the content you reported.”

The post had been deleted by Wednesday afternoon (it’s unclear how or why it was deleted), but the hacked account remains active despite repeated attempts to flag the issue to Facebook, Alderman said.

She added that her friend learned that at least one other person was scammed into thinking they were buying non-existent tickets.

Since she facilitated the sale to her colleagues, Alderman decided to reimburse them herself.

“So now I’m out $1,800 for this whole scam,” he said. “The reason I’m upset with this whole process is because Facebook found out. … I wouldn’t be in this situation if Facebook just deleted the account when it should have.”

Requests for comment sent to both Facebook and Meta on Tuesday were not returned by Thursday afternoon.

“I would never do this to anyone…these scammers have no mercy,” Alderman said. “I’ve had to work all these overtime to pay for this now. For me it’s like two months’ rent.”

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