ORLANDO, Fla. — An Orange County man had tickets to one of the hottest sporting events in central Florida, but just days before the game the tickets were suddenly transferred out of his account to a stranger without his permission.
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Andrew McCoy loves college football. He was excited at the prospect of The University of Colorado football team traveling to Orlando to face the UCF Knights. He bought tickets to the high-profile matchup months in advance of last month’s game.
McCoy told Action 9 Consumer Investigator Jeff Deal, “Deion Sanders and his son. You know, it’s been a big deal around college football, so I wanted to catch it firsthand.”
It was a sold-out crowd at the Bounce House and he knew the atmosphere for the game would be electric.
But Tuesday morning, four days before the Saturday game McCoy woke up to an email from Ticketmaster with the message: Your ticket transfer is on the way to Baby! It was followed up by another email one minute later that showed: Big Jugg has accepted your ticket transfer! The messages were sent around 12:30 in the morning while he was asleep.
“I kind of woke up half groggy, and I kind of thought I was in a nightmare, you know? So, I looked and read it about three times, and I was like, wait a minute, this is real,” he said.
He claims a Ticketmaster worker assured him on the phone they would help get his tickets back. But he showed us online chats from later where he asked if it would be resolved before the game. The messages in return from the company showed the situation was still under review. By the time the game arrived the situation had still not been resolved and McCoy did not have his tickets returned.
He said, “They did not care. And I approached them many times as nice as I could to let them know that, hey, the game is this Saturday. All I want to do is go to the game.”
An online search shows he’s not alone. Action 9 saw dozens of Ticketmaster customers claiming they also had tickets stolen from their accounts. Many of the complaints were posted in the months following Ticketmaster’s massive data breach in May. Personal information was stolen from as many as 500 million customers.
Ticketmaster sent the following statement:
Overall, our digital ticketing innovations have greatly reduced fraud compared to the days of paper tickets and duplicated PDFs. Having that digital history is also how we are able to investigate the situation and restore fans’ tickets. The top way fans can protect themselves is setting a strong unique password for all accounts – especially for their personal email which is where we often see security issues originate. Scammers are looking for new cheats across every industry, and tickets will always be a target because they are valuable, so Ticketmaster is constantly investing in new security enhancements to safeguard fans.
The company doesn’t believe McCoy’s incident was a result of the breach. It noted that Ticketmaster passwords were not exposed in the data incident from earlier this year and because of security measures built into its mobile tickets the company is able to restore almost all tickets.
For Andrew McCoy, it wasn’t an ideal situation. He said, “Immediately I was frustrated. I was irate, you know? I didn’t know what to do at that point.”
He did make it to the game, but only because he shelled out even more money to buy new tickets. He said the tickets were more expensive and the seats were not as good as the original seats he purchased.
After McCoy contacted Action 9, Ticketmaster did refund him for the new tickets. Still, he believes it should have been handled before the event. He said, “I just think it just shows the major disconnect between, you know, major companies and how they feel about us people on the outside. They don’t really care.”
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