The Better Business Bureau of Boston says it’s gotten dozens of reports of people getting scammed or nearly getting scammed while trying to buy tickets for Taylor Swifts upcoming shows at Gillette Stadium
Taylor Swift's Eras Tour is among the biggest concert tours in history.
The pop star will be at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, this month, and many of her New England fans are still trying to get their hands on tickets.
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Unfortunately, that's brought out the scammers, hoping to take advantage.
"I’ve been just kind of scraping the internet for Taylor Swift tickets," Joel Parra said, who is hoping to get a ticket for one of the Gillette shows.
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It hasn't been going well, though. He said he's nearly been scammed out of hundreds of dollars three times while searching for tickets on social media.
"The Venmo account has never made any transactions has zero friends and that’s when I kind of start realizing that it’s a scammer," he said.
Parra said that the scammers can be pretty convincing, but he noticed something was wrong when the sellers got pushy.
"At first, they seem like a totally normal person," Parra said. "And then when you start to refuse the purchase, that’s when they start to get kind of pushy. And then I’ve noticed after like a couple days later, I’ll go back to that person's Facebook, and I’ll find out that they were hacked."
"We have had dozens of people report to the Better Business Bureau that they've been either targeted or a victim of a scam surrounding this Taylor Swift concert," Paula Fleming with BBB Boston said.
Fleming said that the Swift concert is a perfect target for scammers.
"They know that people are willing to pay a high price for a ticket," Fleming said. "They are acting on emotion and just not doing their research. And it makes all of us easy targets, unless we really are levelheaded in doing the research."
So how to stay levelheaded while searching for a ticket?
The BBB says to be skeptical of prices that seem too low, and of buying from someone you don't know online.
Look out for grammatical errors, too.
Fleming said to stay on the safe side, you should stick to an official retailer like Ticketmaster or StubHub, instead of buying on social media.
Parra said he could definitely see how people are falling for the scams.
"I’m super cautious when it comes to online purchases, but I almost did," he said.
If you found yourself the victim of a concert scam, the BBB says you should report it to local police as well as the attorney general's office. You can also report scams or attempted scams to the BBB's online scam tracker.
