Ticketmaster Pauses Transfer of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tickets

Photo Credit: Kenny Eliason

Ticketmaster pauses ticket transfers for all remaining Taylor Swift Eras shows until three days beforehand in the face of reported hacks and theft.As the final leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour rapidly approaches, Ticketmaster has paused ticket transfers for all remaining shows until three days before each event. This change comes in the face of continued reports of fans having their accounts accessed and tickets transferred without their knowledge.

Numerous stories have emerged online of fans surprised to receive an email from Ticketmaster explaining their tickets to Taylor Swift and other big-name shows were inexplicably transferred to another account. Many of these have been reversed by Ticketmaster after media outlets reached out to the ticketing giant for comment, but others reported on social media remain unresolved, with some fans out thousands of dollars.

More troubling still, some ticketholders who had their issues resolved have since had their tickets revert back to the alleged hacker’s account. And some of those affected are being told they will have to wait until three days before the show to have their tickets once again returned to them.

“Having that digital history is also how we are able to investigate the situation and restore fans’ tickets,” a spokesperson for Ticketmaster told The Toronto Star. “The top ways fans can protect themselves is setting a strong unique password for all accounts — especially for their personal email, which is where we often see security issues originate. Scammers are looking for new cheats across every industry, and tickets will always be a target because they are valuable, so Ticketmaster is constantly investing in new security enhancements to safeguard fans.”

Despite boasting about its digital ticketing innovations having greatly reduced fraud “compared to the days of paper tickets and duplicated PDFs,” Ticketmaster was the target of a data breach earlier this year that exposed “some” users’ names, contact information, payment information, and more. But the company insists that users’ passwords were unaffected in this data breach.Strangely, for all the company’s talk about security enhancements, Ticketmaster doesn’t even employ two-factor authentication (2FA) for account logins, much less for ticket transfers, despite 2FA being an account security standard online for years. Even more odd is the fact that Ticketmaster does utilize 2FA for things like printing tickets or changing your email address, so the functionality exists on the platform.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour returns in less than a fortnight on October 18 when she hits the stage in Miami. She then heads to Canada next month with six shows in Toronto and three in Vancouver in December.