GLENDALE, AZ — It's the hot ticket in Arizona this weekend - Taylor Swift's "Eras" concert tour. But scammers are putting on their own performance trying to take advantage of excited fans.
"Urgency - they want you to buy it now, or if there's any outrageous prices. Normally, if it's too good to be true, it usually is," warned Jasmine Hill with the Better Business Bureau as she detailed red flags fans need to look out for when buying resell tickets.
One big red flag: if resellers want cash only, especially cash up-front!
"I wouldn't recommend any cash app payments, any Zelle payments, or, if you don't know the person, any physical cash payments because you can't get those funds back," Hill explained.
She does recommend paying with credit cards. Buyers have more protections if they need to dispute the transaction.
The Let Joe Know team found lots of Taylor Swift concert tickets up for resell on Craigslist, OfferUp, and Facebook Marketplace. Many of them were concerningly cheap.
One Craigslist seller offered lower-level tickets for $250. We checked, and tickets in the same section just one row up were going for $1,100 on Vivid Seats.
Be wary! Why would someone sell tickets at that low of a price when they could get hundreds of dollars more?
"I would stick to those major retailers. If there is a ticket reseller you don't know about, you can check BBB.org," Hill advised.
You likely remember Taylor Swift's tour started out on a bad note because of the Ticketmaster meltdown with the site crash and the cancellation of general sales.
Because of those issues, several national consumer advocacy groups are pushing for the creation of a 'Ticket Buyer Bill of Rights'. The set of principles would serve as a framework for ticketing legislation to improve the live events ticketing market that serves millions of fans a year.
The Bill of Rights features four pillars:
-The Right to Transferability, where ticketholders decide how to use, sell or give away their tickets if they wish and not the entity that previously sold the tickets;
-The Right to Transparency, which includes all-in pricing and disclosures of relevant information for the purchasing decision;
-The Right to Set the Price, so that companies who originally sold the tickets cannot dictate to fans for what price they can or cannot resell their purchased tickets, and, lastly;
-The Right to a Fair Marketplace, where fans compete with actual humans, not illegal software bots, for tickets.
You can read more about the proposal here.
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