A Valley woman is warning others about buying fake event tickets online after she was roped into buying a bad ticket to Rodeo Scottsdale earlier this month.
Viewer Robbie tells the Let ABC15 Know team that she was excited to experience her first live rodeo.
"It's not something that I would normally do, but it's relatively close to where I live. And I thought, you know, let's, let's go try something different," Robbie explained.
Instead of going directly to the Rodeo Scottsdale website, Robbie says she searched for the event on Google and clicked on the first website that popped up.
"That was a bit of a mistake on my part," Robbie admitted.
She says her ticket had the “Bamm Tickets” logo on it, and Bamm tickets was the official ticket vendor for Rodeo Scottsdale.
When she arrived at the event, she found out her ticket was not legitimate.
"The ticket scanner at the door scanned my ticket with the QR code, and she said that the ticket was not valid," Robbie said.
She then discovered she wasn’t the only person at the rodeo dealing with a ticket issue.
"There was a rather large group of people with a representative from Bamm tickets, and he was mid-sentence, explaining that all of their tickets were not valid, and that in order to gain admittance to the rodeo, they were going to have to purchase another ticket at a discounted price, which I thought was nice," Robbie explained.
We reached out to Bamm Tickets, and the company said while it was a relatively small percentage of tickets that were impacted, they take the issue seriously because many people paid significantly more than face value for tickets.
They say the company is focused on trying to prevent this from happening to people moving forward.
Protect yourself when purchasing fake tickets:
- Always go directly to the event website first: Even if you don’t purchase your ticket there, you can see who their official ticket partners are.
- Use secure payment methods: Try to use a credit card if possible and always avoid paying in cash.
- Check the URL: Scammers often try to re-create websites that look like official ones. Look for typos or extra words.
- Avoid too-good-to-be-true deals: Tickets priced significantly less than others are usually fraudulent.
- Avoid social media sellers: Be wary of buying from individuals on social media sites like Facebook, OfferUp and Instagram.
Robbie says she filed a dispute with her credit card company to get her money back for the invalid ticket, and she’s glad she still got to enjoy the rodeo.
"I think that that is a good, a good lesson for people to learn is don't search and definitely don't click on the first search result. You know, you gotta go through and and do a little bit of due diligence before you purchase these things online," Robbie said.
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This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
