How do I buy gig or festival tickets without being scammed?

Ticket fraud is unusual among scams in that the victim goes looking for it. The moment a tour sells out, thousands of people search social media for spares, and sellers appear within minutes with photographs, screenshots and a plausible reason for selling. Almost none of them have tickets.

Safety

Step by step

1. Exhaust the official routes first.The artist's own site, the venue box office, the promoter and the official ticket agent. Official resale, where the event runs it, returns tickets to the same system and is the safest secondary option there is.
2. Use a resale site that is accountable.Look for membership of a recognised trade body such as the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers, and prefer sites that hold the ticket and guarantee delivery. The membership can be checked on the body's own website rather than by trusting a logo on the seller's page.
3. Refuse bank transfer, always.This is the decision that separates a bad purchase from an unrecoverable one. A card payment gives you chargeback, and over a threshold a credit card gives you joint liability with the issuer. A transfer to a stranger gives you a claim under the reimbursement rules and a lot of arguing.
4. Treat social media sellers as unverifiable.Photographs of tickets, screenshots of an order confirmation and a profile with years of history are all obtainable. Accounts are bought, stolen and rented for exactly this.
5. Check what you are actually being sold.Many tickets are now digital, non-transferable and tied to the buyer's account or the card used. A screenshot or a PDF of somebody else's ticket may simply not admit you, even if the seller is honest.
6. Check the price against the face value.A ticket at several times face value from an unknown seller is a warning, not a market. So is a ticket at well below face value, which is bait.
7. Report it if it goes wrong.Report to Action Fraud, or Police Scotland on 101 in Scotland, to the platform, and to your bank the same day. If you paid by card, ask about chargeback immediately.

Tips

• If the event has an official resale or a waiting list, joining it costs nothing and outlasts most of the risky options.
• Buying for a group makes the loss larger and the pressure greater. One person paying for six tickets by transfer is the shape of the worst individual losses reported each summer.
• Screenshots of a ticket with the barcode blurred prove nothing at all. The same ticket is sold to several people at once in the standard version of this fraud.

Common mistakes

• Paying quickly because someone else is interested — Manufactured competition is the core technique. There is no other buyer.
• Using a payment app's friends-and-family option to save the fee — It removes buyer protection, which is exactly why the seller suggested it.

Questions people ask