Four Tips to Avoid Summer Concert Ticket Scams

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwired - Apr 23, 2014) - Summer is right around the corner. That means it's time for longer days, warm weather and summer concert ticket scams. Reselling concert tickets is a $4 billion-a-year business¹. If a deal seems too good to be true, there's a good chance you're about to be scammed. It can be very difficult to identify a fraudulent ticket and nearly 5 million people a year pay for tickets to concerts, sporting events and theme parks that prove to be fakes².

There are three common types of ticket fraud:

• Purchasing a ticket that appears legitimate with a barcode, but it's been copied over and over again. Only the first person to arrive at the venue will be able to get in and if the show is sold out there's no recourse.
• You pay a premium price for what seems to be a ticket close to the stage only to find it's actually in one of the least expensive sections.
• You pay for a ticket online but don't receive it before the event.

Legitimate ticket sellers work very hard to stop this kind of fraud from occurring. They want ticket buyers to have a good experience and get what they actually paid for.

"We work with legitimate ticket sellers every day to stop ticket fraud before it hits consumers," said Vice President of Operations, Molly O'Hearn, of iovation, a technology company that specializes in mobile and online fraud prevention. "Most retail ticket sellers use fraud prevention technology to avoid tickets getting into the hands of dishonest brokers. Legitimate ticket sellers want their customers to get what they paid for and have a great entertainment experience."

Here are four tips to keep in mind when buying tickets online:

1. Stick with known, legitimate sites
Buy from the venue itself or known online ticket sellers like Ticketmaster, TicketsNow or StubHub. Each of these companies offers customer support and buying guarantees. Using an established ticket seller is your best bet when it comes to ticket fraud protection.

2. Be wary of buying tickets through classified ads, Craigslist or eBay
You take a big chance when buying from an individual selling tickets online -- especially if the cost of a ticket is advertised for less than everywhere else. Your chance of running into a scam definitely increases when you deal with an unknown individual.

3. Use a credit card or PayPal
Protect yourself by using a credit card or PayPal to pay for a ticket. If you pay cash or wire a payment you'll have no recourse if the ticket you purchase isn't legitimate. Both credit cards and PayPal have processes for reversing a payment or solving a dispute if you didn't receive the ticket that was advertised.

4. Do research before you buy
If you want to use a lesser-known, or even just new-to-you, ticket outlet do some research up front. You can find out about a company's history by checking their record with the Better Business Bureau. You can also search the National Association of Ticket Brokers site to find out if a ticket seller is a member.

Safeguard your ticket purchases so you can focus on what's important -- music, family, friends and those long summer days -- not the hassle of ticket fraud.

About iovation
iovation protects online businesses and their end users against fraud and abuse through a combination of advanced device identification, shared device reputation and real-time risk evaluation. More than 3,000 fraud managers representing global retail, financial services, insurance, social network, gaming and other companies leverage iovation's database of Internet devices and the relationships between them to determine the level of risk associated with online transactions. The company's device reputation database is the world's largest, used to protect more than 10 million transactions and stop an average of 200,000 fraudulent activities every day. The world's foremost fraud experts share intelligence, cybercrime tips and online fraud prevention techniques in iovation's Fraud Force Community, an exclusive virtual crime-fighting network. For more information, visit www.iovation.com.

¹ The Wall Street Journal, Ticketmaster Wants in on the Scalping Act, Hannah Karp, Aug. 11, 2013.

² AARP Blog, Summer's Bummer: Event Ticket Scams, Sid Kirchheimer, June 27, 2013.