Scammers rob hundreds with fake tickets to Imagine Dragons concert in Kyiv
For her 13th birthday, Ukrainian teenager Sofya Epstein received a special gift from her mother, Tatiana Ivanova: tickets to the concert of her favourite band, Imagine Dragons, in Kyiv on Aug.31.
However, on the night of the show, mother and daughter found themselves among hundreds of other fans who had been scammed by a website selling fake tickets.
While 50,000 people were enjoying the American rock band’s performance at Kyiv’s Olimpiysky Stadium on a Friday night, Ivanova and Epstein stood outside with other exasperated holders of invalid tickets.
“Some people were crying. Many came from other cities and countries,” Ivanova recalled.
She bought two tickets for Hr 2,999 ($110) each in March from an online ticket vendor called e-ticket.in.ua. “The website looked genuine. They had customer support and security measures. They used LiqPay (a service for instant money transfers),” Ivanova told the Kyiv Post.
So Ivanova began investigating. According to her, at least 1,500 people bought tickets from the same website.
That dodgy website was registered on Jan. 25, a few weeks after tickets to Imagine Dragons’ concert officially went on sale. Screenshots show that it continued to sell tickets on Sept.1, after the concert had finished, and was taken down in the evening.
Naturally, the customer support phone number no longer worked. Ivanova and others who bought fake tickets went to check the address listed on the website.
“It was a regular office building, and there weren’t any ticket-selling companies,” Ivanova said. “The security guards told us that, over the weekend, crowds of people came here to look for the same company.”
Ivanova’s post on Facebook on Aug.31 drew dozens of comments from other victims with similar stories.
“We came from Minsk. We also bought three tickets for over Hr 6,000 from e-ticket.in.ua,” wrote Facebook user Irina Slavnikova. Fans came from all over Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Moldova.
Some, like Lviv resident Igor Balitskyi, also reported having been scammed by ticket resellers. He bought two tickets for him and his wife from a reseller on OLX, a Ukrainian site for private vendors.
His tickets looked genuine, he told the Kyiv Post: printed on high-quality paper with a barcode and the logo of Karabas, Ukraine’s largest ticket-selling service. But they were invalid too.
Balitskyi and wife convinced the volunteers at the gates to let them in, and they found other people in their seats who had exactly the same tickets.
“The tickets weren’t fake. They were duplicated. Those people came first, they went through the gates, and we didn’t,” Balitskyi said. He is still unsure whether he and his wife or the other people had the original tickets.
The tickets to Imagine Dragons’ first-ever concert in Kyiv went on sale on Jan. 9. The demand was so high that the organizers had to launch an electronic queue. On the first day, nearly 50,000 people signed up for the waiting list, according to the UNIAN news agency.
“The ticket scam was a huge issue we have had to deal with,” the concert organizers, GAS Concert, told the Kyiv Post. “The demand was unprecedentedly high for Ukraine from the day the tickets went on sale. We don’t know how many hundreds or thousands people purchased fake tickets, but we warned the fans about fraud and advised them to buy only from official distributors.”
