ATLANTA — Ticketmaster customers say their tickets for concerts and events are being stolen from their Ticketmaster accounts after the company suffered a data breach earlier this year.
One of those people was Eric Rein, of Canton.
“Poof. Gone,” Rein said is what happened to the tickets he bought his daughter for Christmas as a present.
They were transferred right out of her Ticketmaster account last week.
“She hadn’t initiated anything. Someone just accessed the account, and transferred the tickets,” Rein told Channel 2 consumer investigator Justin Gray.
Gwinnett County resident Annie Wells had the same thing happen last week to her tickets to Disney on Ice and Post Malone.
“I opened my Ticketmaster app to see four of our tickets for the event on Sunday had been claimed by this random name and they were gone,” Wells said.
Ticketmaster customers all across the country have reported similar issues in recent days.
Seattle resident Virginia Lasky saw 14 tickets disappear.
“When I clicked on the tickets one by one, it showed they had all been transferred and claimed,” Lasky said.
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In an SEC filing in the spring, Ticketmaster acknowledged a data breach of a third-party cloud database.
The hackers claimed to have stolen information of up to 500 million Ticketmaster customers.
Ticketmaster told Channel 2 Action News that customer passwords were not exposed in the data incident.
Ticketmaster says in a statement, “Overall, our digital ticketing innovations have greatly reduced fraud compared to the days of paper tickets and duplicated PDFs. Having that digital history is also how we are able to investigate and successfully return tickets for fans.”
But Ticketmaster customers who spoke to Channel 2 Action News wondered why no two-factor authentication is required to transfer tickets that can be worth hundreds of dollars each.
“Once you purchase them, they’re really an asset. And you need to do everything you can personally to protect your assets, but you’re also relying on that company to help you with that,” Rein said.
Wells got her Disney on Ice tickets returned about 30 minutes before Sunday night’s show.
She’s still waiting on the Post Malone tickets.
The Reins also got their tickets returned just in time for Monday night’s show.
Ticketmaster says customer emails are likely the place where passwords are being compromised. But both Wells and Rein say they cannot see how that is possible in their cases.
“Someone had to have had my exact password because I don’t typically have passwords that are the same for every platform or website. So, they know this exact password and I didn’t have to authenticate an unusual login from another location or anything like that,” Wells said.
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