Hackers Keep Stealing Tickets From People’s Ticketmaster Accounts

If you haven’t changed the password on your Ticketmaster account recently, you probably want to. The online ticket sales company is continuing to deal with the fallout from a data breach earlier this year affecting over 500 million customers, and customers are taking the brunt of impact.

Business Insider reported yesterday about a string customers checking their emails only to discover that someone had broken into their Ticketmaster accounts and transferred their tickets away:

In September, Vashti-Jasmine McKenzie noticed an event had mysteriously vanished from her Google Calendar. It was a reminder for an Usher concert in Dallas on October 5, synced with her Ticketmaster account.

McKenzie opened her email to a shock: The night before, a stranger had broken into her account, accessed McKenzie’s two tickets, which she had paid $550 for, and transferred them out of her account.

McKenzie was eventually able to get her tickets returned to her by Ticketmaster’s customer support. Others haven’t been so lucky: Business Insider identified another individual who had their tickets stolen, returned to them by Ticketmaster, only to visit their concert and encounter two individuals who discovered their tickets had been swiped only once they got to the gate. Reddit, similarly, is home to many complaints from users saying similar things had happened to them.

Ticket scalping is big business these days, and so it’s no surprise that Ticketmaster accounts are of high value. It’s unclear how exactly customer accounts are being accessed—following Ticketmaster’s breach, security experts said that it didn’t appear passwords had been compromised. And you would think any tech company today uses hashing rather than storing passwords in plaintext.

Either way, hackers seemingly have been able to run wild through Ticketmaster accounts, adding even more headache to a rough few years for the company.

Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, was sued in May by the Department of Justice for antitrust, with the agency alleging the ticketing giant is behaving anti-competitively by requiring performers use Ticketmaster at venues it operates. Besides handling ticketing through Ticketmaster, Live Nation handles promotions for most major concert venues in the U.S., and also operates hundreds of venues on its own. Basically it offers the whole soup to nuts package.

It’s not just the Justice Department mad at Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Concertgoers have been frustrated with the companies for years over the poor handling of ticket sales, including using frustration virtual lines and “dynamic pricing” to jack up the prices of in-demand tickets. It’s gotten to the point that some have been put off from even going to concerts at all if they have to deal with Ticketmaster—which is most of the time.

The argument against these companies is that, because they control ticketing for nearly 70% of major concert venues in the U.S., they do not have incentive to improve, and have used their control to gouge venues and artists. In 2023, a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation concluded that Ticketmaster’s exclusive contracts create significant barriers to entry for competitors. Licensing, permits, and other regulatory barriers favor players like Live Nation and Ticketmaster that can handle the costs. From an NPR article written at the time:

Klobuchar sees three main issues with Ticketmaster, as she explained in both the interview and her opening statement at the hearing: It controls more than 70% of the market for ticketing and live events, it controls much of the promotion of those events, and it either owns or has yearslong exclusive contracts with many large venues.

Live Nation was permitted to acquire Ticketmaster back in 2010 after signing a consent decree saying, among other things, it would not retaliate against venues that chose other ticketing providers, meaning they can still promote through Live Nation. But again, Live Nation controls a vast swath of major venues, where it requires the use of Ticketmaster. Live Nation for its part, has argued that it’s operating in a free market, pointing to competitors like AXS and SeatGeek, and says that its scale has allowed it to offer better technology and lower prices to consumers. Its market share has declined somewhat since 2010 and its prices are comparable to to other ticket marketplaces, it has said.

However things play out going forward, especially under another Trump administration, today the reality is that Ticketmaster is still dominant, so if you have to use it, we recommend changing your password, enabling two-factor authentication, and turning on account alerts for any attempted ticket transfers.