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A Canadian family recently fell victim to a Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket scam which left them out a whopping $15,600. They weren’t alone either as hundreds of others also reportedly fell for it.
The mother of the family from Ottawa, Mel Keogh, says he purchased 28 tickets for the Toronto stop on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. She purchased the tickets in August at a price of $788 CAD ($562 USD) each for a total of $22,000 CAD ($15,687 USD).
Keogh says she bought the tickets for several concerts and sporting events from an independent broker she had used before and had even met face-to-face. So she felt comfortable making the purchase for her 15-year-old daughter and several other people, including their neighbors.
“They were absolutely ecstatic,” Keogh told told CTV News Ottawa. “My daughter knows every Taylor Swift song, every word, every album, every era, everything. This was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
That excitement quickly turned to massive disappointment when they found out their Taylor Swift concert tickets were a scam.
“To break it to the girls that we weren’t going… it was horrendous,” Keogh said. “It was all we’d been talking about for over a year.”
The disappointment was amplified because they had spent weeks making bracelets and choosing outfits and had even planned to book limousines and hotels for the event.
“We thought we had done everything right. The confirmation codes, the seat numbers—it all looked legitimate,” said Mel Keogh’s sister-in-law Patricia. “It’s gone, it’s all gone. We let our family down. How could we have missed this? We feel like such fools.”
She added, “I can’t believe that somebody in this world would do that intentionally.”
Earlier this week, CTV News Ottawa reported that a scam claiming to be selling Taylor Swift concert tickets in Toronto had ripped off around four hundred people.
“There’s a Google doc that is circulating that we are all filling out and we all have access to it. As of late [Friday] night, it’s over $300,000,” said Jenny Beck, a mom from Oakville, Ontario, who was scammed.
“There are over 200 individuals who have purchased tickets and we figure she promised 450 tickets to everybody in total,” said another victim, Alaina Attard, adding, “The scope of it is absolutely massive.”
On Tuesday, CTV News Ottawa published a warning about Taylor Swift ticket scams from cybersecurity technology analyst Ritesh Kotak.
“It has created this perfect storm for fraudsters and hackers to exploit,” he said. “And we’ve seen scams in overdrive.”