Some Ticketmaster customers’ bought-and-paid-for tickets are disappearing from their accounts.
“I started to freak out,” said Nick in San Francisco.
He was panicking because his kids’ birthday presents vanished.
“For our son, we got tickets to Imagine Dragons," he said. "And for our daughter, Taylor Swift. She’s eight years old and is a huge Swiftie."
The tickets had been stored in his Ticketmaster account. Until they weren’t. A surprise email told Nick the tickets were transferred out of his account – without his permission. So, he logged in to check.
“Indeed, my tickets were gone," he said. "Both for Imagine Dragons and Taylor Swift. And as you can imagine, pricey tickets… we’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars. I could see my tickets for sale on StubHub. I tell customer service this, and [they said], ‘There’s nothing we can do.’”
Nick’s not alone. Frustrated fans coast to coast are sounding off to the Responds and Responde teams at our NBC and Telemundo sister stations.
“Between 4:16 a.m. and 4:20 a.m., they took my tickets and successfully transferred them to themselves,” Jess Mantione told NBC 10 Responds in Philadelphia.
Outside New York City, Brenda Assolino had the same experience.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
“I was like, my tickets were gone,” she told NBC New York’s Lynda Baquero.
In San Diego, Breauna Hannon’s tickets vanished, too.
“Our tickets were transferred to somebody we didn’t know,” she told NBC San Diego Responds.
Many customers said Ticketmaster was no help.
“They told me they’d get back to me in 24 hours, and they didn’t,” Hannon said.
Ticketmaster took our team’s calls and started helping people. Nick and others said they got their tickets back.
“I did not get a response until I contacted NBC,” Nick said.
Fans are calling Ticketmaster on the carpet about its security.
“So that they change their ways,” Nick said.
Ticketmaster suffered a data breach this summer. But it says users’ passwords “were not exposed” back then. So, what’s causing this sudden surge of disappearing tickets, today? We asked for an interview, but didn’t hear back. A rep did agree to speak with our NBC 5 Responds colleague P.J. Randhawa in Chicago.
The rep basically blamed weak user passwords.
“If you haven’t updated your account recently and if you’re using a password you use in a lot of different places, they can get into your account,” said Dan Wall, E.V.P. at Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company.
Nick’s skeptical, especially since he followed Ticketmaster’s recommendation after the data breach.
“I changed my password after they notified me,” he said. “Maybe it’s related. Maybe not. I don’t know. But I do know, as of about two weeks ago, if you look at the Reddit boards, that’s when it started exploding.”
Whatever’s happening behind the scenes, Nick wants Ticketmaster to beef up its security. He’s astonished that Ticketmaster does not use two-factor authentication, even though "2FA" has become a common tech tool to protect people’s online accounts.
“My wife, to book her hairdresser appointment, needed two-factor authentication,” he said. "It’s bonkers that [Ticketmaster users] have thousands of dollars of merchandise in an account and the security is so weak.”
If you have a Ticketmaster account, we recommend you log in now, change your password and make it different from your others. Also, check to see if any tickets are missing. If so, tell Ticketmaster immediately. If they don’t fix it, you can let the NBC Bay Area Responds team make some noise.
Meredith Royster, Doreen Geiger, Cinthia Pasillas Yañez, and Jim O'Donnell contributed to this report.
