Sold out summer concerts create fertile soil for fakes
Tickets to this coming weekend's The Weeknd concert in Tallinn were sold out long ago, while fans still hoping to secure a pass often fall victim to fraudsters and fake tickets.
Tickets to The Weeknd concert were sold out a week and half after they first came up for sale. This demand has also created opportunities for criminals.
It can be quite difficult to spot a fake, which is why event organizers advise against buying tickets on the aftermarket.
"It does not have to be a case of forgery as there have been situations where the same ticket has been sold to different people. What happens there is that the first person to use the ticket gets in, while those who then show up with the same ticket number cannot," said Ott-Sander Palm," head of marketing for organizer Live Nation.
Palm suggested that fans who are bent on sourcing tickets second hand study the minute details. Fakes can often have the wrong email address, date of printing, telephone numbers or indeed the country of issue.
It is worth keeping in mind that tickets to The Weeknd's Tallinn show were only available in the Baltics or Finland. Palm said that people should not put their faith in PDF files.
"We have often received such works of art in the mail, which make you wonder at the trouble people are willing to go to forge a ticket," Palm remarked.
"There have been Photoshop products. Attempts to take pictures of the artist or official design work and plant them on a different ticket base, adding the correct date of gate info, something that matches the event," he said.
Palm said that it is also important to run a thorough background check on people offering second-hand tickets for sale.
Because organizers cannot do anything to fight this kind of fraud, they and the police urge victims of such schemes to turn to the authorities.
"It always pays to report falling victim to fraud. We will do our best to find the people perpetrating such offenses. Therefore, I would urge turning to the police. The worst case is if people do not report such incidents, keeping us from getting to the bottom of who is perpetrating them," said Pirko Pärila, head of the East Harju Police Department's patrol service.
The police have received two reports of such offenses recently, regarding concerts of The Weeknd and Depeche Mode.
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Editor: Marcus Turovski
