At the end of August, Oasis surprised its fans with a long-awaited reunion tour. Days later, the band grabbed headlines again after yet another ticket fiasco, as fans – including me – scrambled to get their hands on some of the hottest (and priciest!) tickets around.
The first set of tickets to go on sale at 9 a.m. were for the Dublin shows, and I found myself at number 511,751 in the queue. An hour later, the rest of the tickets went on sale for shows in England, Scotland, and Wales.
Together with my partner, we were able to get in the queue for tickets in both London and Manchester, which was a lot further than many got (thousands were left waiting to just access the ticket vendor website). But, at number 39,000 and 107,000 in the queue respectively, our hopes weren’t high.
After three hours, we finally got through to actually purchase tickets for the London shows, and an hour later, for those in Manchester, but with surge-pricing bumping ticket prices by 140%, we decided that £355 a ticket was just too much to spend to see a concert – even one put on by one of our favorite bands.
We then began seeing warnings about the potential for scams, as fraudsters preyed on the desperation of fans to get once-in-a-lifetime tickets. This wasn’t the first time we heard these warnings either. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour generated similar alerts and reports of tickets scams earlier this year.
What’s the (scam) story, morning glory?
I then decided to take a look at BioCatch’s data to see if banks could detect an increase in scams around high-profile tours like those from Oasis and Taylor Swift.
Before investigating, we must clarify our terms: We know if consumers report these scams to their bank, fraud teams there will categorise them as payment scams. We also know people can fall victim to these scams at any time between the tickets going on sale right up until the concert taking place. But in any case, most consumers wouldn’t discover they bought a phony ticket until they reached the stadium and attempted to have a ticket agent scan their ticket’s bar or QR code.
With this in mind, we would expect to see an increase in payment scams being reported around the date of the concert.
Taking Taylor Swift as an example, she announced the European leg of The Eras Tour in 2023, with tickets going on sale in July. These concerts took place in the UK from June 7-23 and again from Aug. 15-20. We will focus on the first dates for this analysis (at the time of writing, it is likely not all August fraud cases had yet been reported).
Analysing fraud volumes, particularly purchase scams, we do not see any shift or spike in Q2. Volumes are in line with those seen the year before for the same quarter.
As we drill down into the data further, however, we do uncover some interesting findings.
Although we know consumers risk falling victim to purchase scams for concert tickets at any time, one could assume the risk is potentially higher soon after tickets go on sale, with the heightened disappointment of not being able to buy tickets through official channels and the desperation to see their favourite artists driving fans to seek out third-party ticket venders.
This suggests victims of concert-ticket purchase scams might take longer to report the scams to the bank (because they don’t realize they’ve fallen victim until they show up at the venue gates, sometimes many months after they bought the tickets). In the case of The Eras Tour, this could be anywhere up to 11 months.
As we look at the time taken to report scams, we see consistency throughout 2023 and the first part of 2024. On average, 99% of all purchase scams reported to BioCatch are done so within three months of the banking session taking place (when the victim transferred funds), and 82% are within just one month.
In June, we see a shift in this pattern. Instead of just 1% of purchase scams having a reporting delay of more than three months, 8% of all cases reported in June took as long, with 3% taking longer than six months.
Likewise, cases reported at the beginning of July see similar numbers (11% at three or more months and 3% at six or more months), while cases reported in the second half of July see a trend towards previously seen numbers (4% of cases longer than three months, and just 0.8% above six months).
Of course, this could be a coincidence, but the apparent return to normal immediately after the concert date does suggest the potential for an out-of-the-ordinary event responsible for a shift in patterns seen in reported fraud cases. A high-profile concert – such as a Taylor Swift show – with off-the-charts demand, breaking all kinds of tour records around the world, could explain this.
Thus, going back to the latest scramble for tickets caused by the Oasis reunion, data suggests that reports of ticket scams could translate into a change in the fraud banks see. While banks may not learn of these scams until the summer of 2025 after the shows take place, the scams are happening now, as people search for tickets online after failing to secure them from the box office.In the UK, on the eve of the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) changing reimbursement and liability rules, it’s even more important for banks to pay attention to where their customers might fall victim to bogus ticket sales.
