PreferredSeat.com Blog

If you’re looking to buy a last minute ticket for baseball’s Championship Series this weekend you have to be very careful where you buy that ticket and the seller has to be careful as well that he doesn’t get scammed. And these are just the kind of sporting events that scams pop up at because of the high price of the ticket and the fans desire to get a deal. And it will get worse for the World Series where prices may start at over $1000 per ticket this year.

Most of the scams involving tickets will come from free listing sites such as Craigslist because there is no way to verify the identity of the ticket seller. Other scams can be found on the internet with websites that have no address and in some cases no phone number either. In most cases the fan won’t find out until they get to the event and find the tickets are no good.

Then you get the low price scams where you don’t see the true price of the ticket until you start entering your personal information and then the hidden fees pop up. Our company even gets customers calling and telling us they can buy our tickets cheaper on another website, until we point out the hidden fees.

For ticket brokers selling baseball playoff tickets the risk is even greater. In most cases if the buyer pays for their tickets by credit card and if they are scammed the credit card company takes the hit or passes it onto the ticket seller.

But the ticket broker must make sure of two things: That all of the tickets he buys and sells are legitimate, and the customer is really a customer and not someone with a stolen credit card. And to do this for last minute sale they may require a faxed copy of a sales agreement, credit card and driver’s license. Or they may just need to call you back at the phone number associated with the credit card to make sure you are who you say you are.

For the customers they say if the deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. For ticket brokers if the customer cares little about the price, where the seats are, and they want the tickets sent to a different address than the billing address for the credit card, the red flags come up.