WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah — Scammers on social media are targeting concert goers who are looking for tickets to a sold out show.
Country music star Morgan Wallen is performing at USANA Amphitheatre in West Valley City on September 10. The concert is sold out, except for tickets being ‘resold’ on third-party sites or via a ‘verified retailer’ on LiveNation.
“She was very nice and told us the price and thought it was reasonable so I sent the money,” said Jana Lantor, who saw a post for tickets available on the ‘Tremonton Utah Classified’s’ Facebook page. “We realized pretty quickly that we were being scammed for the first time.”
Lantor traded messages with the scammer on Facebook. Agreed to a price of $100 per ticket and sent the money. The seller also tried to get her to pay more for a ‘transfer fee’. When she declined and after trading a few messages, she never got the tickets and was out $200.
“If it seems to good to be true, it is,” Lantor said.
The scam is noticeable on social media with profiles posting in groups saying they have four tickets available. Despite people mentioning in the comments section on Facebook, others are still falling for the scam.
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“It sounded at first, initially too good to be true, first red flag right there,” said Nate Bos, who already has tickets to the show but wanted to help friends purchase some. “They’ll get pushy, they’ll try to do a take-away, like ‘oh if you’re not interested, I’ve got other people that are interested so I’m just going to move on to those people that are interested.”
Bos tapped out of the Facebook conversation after noticing a number of red flags.
“Don’t pay somebody that you don’t know unless you’re going to pay them in person,” said Bos.
The Utah Department of Commerce encourages people to do their research before purchasing items online such as concert tickets.
“Click on a profile, do a little bit of investigative research, get the know the person you’re trying to buy something from, typically it doesn’t take a lot to realize that this person is legitimate or this person is just a fake profile or is scamming somebody,” said Zach Whitney with the Department of Commerce. “People can be anonymous and it can be difficult to track those people down and without being able to track those people down there is not a lot of recourse.”
