Disappearing tickets found

A Kelowna man says his tickets for an upcoming UFC event in Edmonton were transferred to someone else without his permission.

Tom Wilson tells Castanet he purchased the tickets for the event, which takes place on November 2, 2024, including flights and a hotel for himself and his girlfriend.

He was looking forward to the event until he received a notification saying his tickets had been successfully transferred to someone else.

"I didn't make a transfer, and they're being transferred to some sketchy email address and using no names, so I'm freaking out," Wilson says.

He reached out to Ticketmaster customer service to try and get an explanation but had a hard time getting with a real person.

"I called them several times," but Wilson says despite being told that the tickets would no longer be valid for the person they were transferred to they didn't offer to reissue tickets to him.

"So you've frozen them, so now, send them back to my account. I'm sure this is super simple for you guys. And they go, no, that's not what we're going to be doing. We have to do this lengthy investigation and whatnot. And they said that we'll call you at some point before your event."

Because Wilson has flights and a hotel already booked he pushed for a quicker resolution before he cancelled his flight and hotel.

"It might be upwards of the day before the event. I go, are you serious? I've got plane flights and hotels on top of this expensive ticket charge. And they don't seem to care," Wilson says.

That's when Wilson picked up the phone and called Castanet to share his story.

Castanet reached out to Ticketmaster and were told, "we were able to recover the fan’s tickets and restore them to his account. Fan support will be reaching out to notify him," Ticketmaster said in an email response.

The email went on to say, "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 and successfully return tickets like we did for Mr. Wilson.

"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," says the email statement from a Ticketmaster.

Despite what appears to be a relatively swift solution to Wilson's issue he doesn't understand why it would take that long or have to take measures like contacting the media to get a resolution.

"These online services, the chatbot provides you absolutely no help whatsoever. They say four hours, that probably means never. So I call their phone lines, which, again, of course, take forever to pick up, and then once they do pick up there's no help whatsoever," Wilson says.

For its part, Ticketmaster advises clients that Ticketmaster passwords were not exposed in an online data hacking incident earlier this year and, "what we’re seeing is scammers accessing a fan’s email account."