Ticketmaster tickets are mysteriously disappearing from customers' accounts

Some Ticketmaster users are encountering a mysterious situation where expensive concert tickets they purchased are being debited from their account without their permission.

According to NBC Bay Area who spoke with users of the ticket purchasing platform, many report that they logged into their accounts to find that the tickets they had purchased had disappeared and been transferred to people they did not know.

“I started freaking out,” a person named Nick told the publication. “We got tickets to Imagine Dragons for our son, and Taylor Swift for our daughter. She's eight years old and a huge Swiftie.

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“In fact, my tickets were gone,” he told NBC. “Both Imagine Dragons and Taylor Swift.” And as you can imagine, expensive tickets…we're talking thousands and thousands of dollars here. I was able to see my tickets for sale on StubHub. I'll tell customer service that, and [they said]“We can’t do anything.” ”

A Ticketmaster representative tells PEOPLE in a statement: “Overall, our digital ticketing innovations have significantly reduced fraud compared to the days of paper tickets and duplicate PDFs. Using this digital history, we are also able to investigate the situation and restore fan safety. Tickets in almost every case.

They added: “Scammers are looking for new scammers in every industry and tickets will always be a target because they are valuable. That’s why Ticketmaster continues to invest in new security improvements to keep fans safe.”

Although NBC noted that Nick and some other users were able to get their tickets back by talking to Ticketmaster, others apparently had different experiences.

“If you haven't updated your account recently and you have a password that you use in many different places, they can access your account,” Dan Wall, EVP at Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent company, told NBC in a statement .

To prevent tickets from being stolen, Ticketmaster asks PEOPLE users to “set a strong, unique password for all accounts – especially their personal email address, which we often see create security issues.”

This isn't the first time Ticketmaster's security has been questioned recently. In April 2024, the company suffered a data breach, which the company subsequently confirmed in a document accompanying the incident. There, officials wrote: “We are in the process of notifying relevant customers by email or post. If you are not contacted, we will not assume that your sensitive information was involved.”

Other stolen data at the time included “encrypted credit card information as well as some other personal information provided to us,” Ticketmaster said.

In September, Kaitlyn Henrich, senior vice president of Ticketmaster, said Today about the April breach: “Ticketmaster invests more in security and verification than the rest of the industry combined.” It also noted that “Ticketmaster account passwords were not compromised” and “unauthorized activity was limited to a third-party database “.