Every day, hundreds of scammers flood Facebook Event pages with tickets to shows, oftentimes at cheaper than face value, or offering a discounted price due to their inability to attend the show. They claim their loss is your gain, but in reality, they’re going to pocket your money and move on to their next victim.
There’s a lot of ways you can filter through these posts, however, and prevent you from being the next victim. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Here we have ‘Oduoye Sandra’ posting that she wants to get her money back for some tickets. Let’s investigate the profile a little more. Here is ‘Sandra’s profile.
It appears that this person, nicknamed “Classy” on her profile, works at ‘USA Airline Pilot’, has no location of where they have lived, or even current city, zero mutual friends, and a weird variety of photos.
Let’s see if we can find out what her friends are like, and if she is really someone who might have some tickets for sale for this event. After proceeding to her current profile photo, she has 4 friends who decided to give her a like on her most recent picture.
Here we have a friend who studied at a University in Nigeria (top left), a person who’s photos show her living in Nigeria (bottom left), another person who studied at a university in Nigeria (top right), and someone who studied at… you guessed it, a university in Nigeria (bottom right). I wonder if they know that prince who was supposed to send me millions of dollars after I sent him a 100-dollar Amazon gift card to cover taxes.
I don’t think too much more has to be said about this profile not being legitimate.
Moving on, let’s look at another profile, here.
Here we have Vera George, who has tickets “up for sales (sic)” due to a tragic sudden illness with her son. Your first red flag should be the lack of grammar, but I’ll let that slide. We know not everyone on the internet is good with English, even the native speakers. However, I wonder why she was deciding to take her family, young child included, to see Slander’s Alchemy Tour in October.
Clicking on her profile, there are again, no mutual friends, an account made just over a year ago, no location of where she lives or where she’s from, and the only photo’s of her appear to be two completely different people, and it looks like her toddler age child probably wouldn’t enjoy the heavy bass line-up anyways. Let’s check out that photo she posted back in July in the bottom left of this screen capture.
Again, a lot of her friends are all from Nigeria, so we have another obvious scammer.
I chose this second profile, because at the time I saw her comment, several people were already messaging her for tickets, when it took me about 30 seconds to realize this was a scam profile.
Sometimes the scammers aren’t always so obvious, so here are some things you can personally do to prevent being scammed.
First to Know
-Merch
-Shows
-Music