Buying a ticket for a concert is not what it used to be, many will agree. Tickets are limited, new music is a bigger industry than ever before and age restrictions have been lowered – there are even festivals devoted to under 18’s. Many will turn to eBay to buy their tickets, and why not?
eBay offers that service that is that little bit more exclusive than buying from an official vendor.
You can nearly always find what you want on the site but when you get scammed and lose £180, like I did, things don’t seem that peachy anymore.
The price looked good and genuine enough for a buyer to show interest in, feedback was 100% positive – with all comments relating to ticket sales, and the sell count was in the ‘power seller’ category. Judging from this alone, I and a friend bought two for £360. A few days passed and all of the samey admin came through about what courier would be used, if it needed to be signed for, codes and tracking number etc.
Days passed after the money had been taken out of our account and we received no word of dispatch from then on. We notified eBay through a link and they said they would look into it.
It was only after we left negative feedback with the tag words Scam and Fraud that eBay took interest and shut the account down, stopping the other 60 or so tickets from being sold. By contacting other sellers, while eBay was in the process of removing the sellers products, we were able to tell others to cancel all bank transfers and stop payment.
After independent investigation into the scam eBay were able to confirm that the account had been inactive for three years, enabling the seller to change or effectively steal another eBay ID and use it as his/her own – totally fake, or course.
We then contacted the police to which we received a simple ‘crime number’ which we could quote if there were any more developments. As far as our bank went it couldn’t get involved as the case is treated as a civil matter, meaning that seller and buyer are responsible for their relationship and dealings that go on between them. We have been told if there aren’t any drastic developments soon we will not be refunded the money.
One could say this is a way not to go about trying to buy a ticket. If it looks too good to be true, it normally is. If I could give any advice I would say either buy the tickets nearer the festival date and make sure that the tickets can be viewed on the seller’s page, or simply buy from the promoter’s website.
All the links below [removed by moderator] point to eBay pages that have been hijacked via Javascript injection and I have been asking eBay for the past week to do something about it and they are still unable to do so and this is first year ‘IT’ stuff to stop so it looks like eBay seem to profit in some way from this action.
I was scammed by a person who had no less than eight eBay account that had only been closed down after several members got together to complain and yet all eBay can do is hide behind the data protection act when asked by myself to provide details of the person involved and even the trading standards are having to wait 3 weeks for information.
Time eBay was closed down IMHO.