COLUMBIA, S.C. – (WIS) A Richland County mother said a hacker stole and sold her tickets to the hottest event in town, Saturday’s premier league match between Liverpool and Manchester United.
In an exclusive interview with WIS, Sarah Baldwin explained how she shelled out nearly $1,000 to give her eight-year-old son Ashton the experience of a lifetime.
This week, though, those plans took an unexpected turn.
Back in February, Baldwin waited in a queue on Tickemaster’s website for presale tickets to the game back in February.
She was at the beach on Sunday when she received an email informing her that those tickets had been sold without her knowledge or consent.
That email read, “Sarah, congratulations your ticket listing just flew off the shelf!”
It was not until Monday that she saw the email, which began a week of headaches.
Liverpool is Ashton’s favorite team, and he was excited to sit near the action and possibly get autographs from some of his favorite players.
Ashton described his anticipation and said, “I was like really excited for like the past three-four months, and then –”
“They’re gone,” Baldwin replied.
When his mother told him about the situation, Ashton was crushed.
“I just couldn’t believe that he wasn’t going to get to go, how was I going to explain this to him?” Baldwin said. “Now I’m out almost $1,000 and tickets. And what I keep thinking about is what if I had noticed this and we would have showed up at the game on Saturday and we couldn’t get in because we didn’t have valid tickets.”
The tickets, Baldwin said, ended up in the hands of a hacker, who accessed her account and sold them.
In a customer support chat on Sunday morning, the hacker explained that they were trying to sell the tickets but that two-factor authentication was not working.
“I’m not getting neither code to my email or phone number. I checked my spam as well, nothing,” one of those messages stated.
A customer support agent named Gerald responded shortly thereafter, and provided a detailed explanation on how to sell the tickets, to which the hacker replied, “…”
When Baldwin realized something is off, she responded in the thread the following evening, writing, “Help the previous messages have not been from me.”
However, she did not receive a response until several hours later.
Baldwin remains perplexed at how the hacker was able to bypass two-factor authentication.
“How is it that the hacker seems to be having a back-and-forth conversation, and then the real account owner is saying, ‘Help, fraud, this is wrong,’ and I’m having to wait six hours for a generic response?” she said.
Even after she raised the red flag, the sham sale still went through to an out-of-state debit card.
“If you go into a local store now to buy something and you go to return it, you have to use your original payment method,” Baldwin said. “To me, if Ticketmaster is letting the name change and the state and everything change, they’re almost assisting the hackers do this.”
Baldwin is sharing her story to raise awareness and get accountability.
“It’s maddening really because I still want to go events, but I can’t in good conscience order from Ticketmaster and go through this again,” she said. “I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to get some resolution for nothing this week.”
Baldwin had not heard from Ticketmaster in more than 48 hours.
Only a few hours after WIS started asking questions of Ticketmaster, she got a call from their support team around 5 P.M., offering to give her money back and apologizing for the ordeal.
She was also told that the company could return her initial seats to her, but she did not trust that this would work properly.
The Baldwins will still be attending the historic match on Saturday.
Some generous friends gifted the pair tickets, but they are not the row 5 tickets her son had been hoping for.
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