LOS ANGELES (KABC) — As country music fans prepare to head to Stagecoach this weekend, one fan has a warning for anyone looking for tickets on social media.
Last month, Niki Jones posted to the Facebook Group Country Thunder she was looking for four general admission tickets and campsite to the Arizona country music festival.
While the group is for fans of the festival, scammers are also search for victims to prey on.
Jones said she came across a post in the Facebook Group from a woman offering to sell her tickets and campsite. So Jones immediately sent the woman a direct message, offering to buy them.
“I pretty much tried to do the due diligence about trying to make sure they weren’t scammers by asking them simple questions like, ‘How are we going to do this? How would we do this?’ They said, ‘We can do it though AXS.’”
AXS is an app commonly used to transfer concert tickets. Jones said the woman offered to sell the tickets and campsite for $2,800.
“She sent me a screenshot that showed that she had the campsites and four general admission tickets and so we went on this big spiel about how we were going to transfer because she was not in the state of Arizona.”
The seller asked for Jones to send a payment via the pay app Zelle, which Jones did but only $500 due to Zelle’s limit.
But the next, Jones saio she grew suspicious when the seller asked Jones to send in her second payment to different Zelle account. That’s when Jones asked the seller to send her a portion of the tickets before making another payment.
“As soon as I got the email, like, okay well there is $500 gone,” said Jones.
The email was an obvious fake with a cut-and-paste job of the Country Thunder Music Festival’s logo. Also, Jones knew the tickets could only be transferred on the AXS app, which she never received.
“You don’t send it through email, you send it through AXS … all the tickets, campsites are all done through AXS,” she said.
Jones asked for the seller to send back her money, which the seller did not do and broke off contact.
Eyewitness News tried to contact the seller with the phone number provided to Jones. The call was unable to connect. Jones did eventually get to go to her concert but she has this advice for Stagecoach fans.
“I won’t ever buy anything from anyone that’s across the country,” she said.
Authorities said if you do plan to buy concert tickets on Facebook, start by checking the seller’s profile. If the profile appears new or has very few posts, then the seller might be a scammer.
Source: News