As Taylor Swift is set to embark on the Canadian leg of her Eras world tour, scammers are taking advantage of the insatiable demand for tickets to the sold-out shows.

“It’s just hard to point out who is real,” said Summer Nickel.

Nickel, 20, is a long-time fan from Maple Ridge, B.C., and she’s been trying to buy resale tickets to one of the three Vancouver shows since they sold out almost instantly last summer. Of the roughly 15 times she’s tried to buy them, every attempt has resulted in failure.

Fraudsters are capitalizing on the lengths diehard Swifties will go to snag a seat to one of her Canadian shows, often bilking them out of thousands of dollars and leaving them heartbroken and disappointed.

“They’re very needy,” said Nickel. “They want you to send the money now.”

Nickel says her mother, who has also been trying to buy her tickets, almost fell victim, thinking a Facebook friend had posted tickets for sale on their page. Turns out, the account was hacked.

Not only that, Nickel showed CBC News screen shots of a fake account under her own name created to scam other people.

“Clearly that’s not me because I’m searching for tickets,” she said. “It’s just really crazy what it’s come to.”

An element of legitimacy

Ritesh Kotak, a cybersecurity and technology analyst in Toronto, says people tend to fall for scams when the seller is purportedly a friend because there’s a level of trust there.

“It adds an element of legitimacy,” he said.

“These tickets are a hot commodity. There’s clearly individuals willing to pay top dollar for it and hackers and fraudsters are going to do everything in their power to exploit it.”

Some people whose accounts were hacked told CBC News they tried to report the fraud to Facebook, and got friends and family to do the same, but in many cases, they say the social media company did not take the posts or accounts down.

“I felt helpless and just so bad that my name was being used to scam others,” said Sonia Sidhu, a Toronto woman whose Facebook account was hacked last July.

After Swift’s concert tickets sold out, the hacker immediately started posting in Sidhu’s professional and community groups that she had tickets for sale.

She knows of least four people who were scammed, some out of as much as $1,600. She says people in her network reported the account to Facebook.

Sidhu herself reported it to police and to Facebook about 20 to 30 times, to no avail. The hacked account is still up.

“It’s irresponsible,” she said. “[Facebook] knows that these accounts are being hacked. They’re being used to scam people and they don’t care.”

CBC News reached out to Facebook several times for a response but did not receive one.

As a result of the soaring demand for Eras tickets, Ticketmaster enforced new rules earlier this month, only allowing ticket transfers within 72 hours of a show. The move came after a spike in reported hacks of Ticketmaster accounts.

However, police in Toronto say the best way to avoid being scammed is to verify the seller’s identity — like by calling up the friend who appears to be selling the tickets. Police are rarely able to dedicate resources to finding scammers due to the huge volume of fraud reports they get.

“It’s very, very difficult for that money to ever be seen again,” said Det. David Coffey with the Toronto Police Service’s financial crimes unit.

“It’s beyond the financial loss,” he said. “It’s really the heartbreak that we see because it’s parents that are desperate to buy these tickets for their kids, or kids themselves who are desperate to get them.”

Fraud on the rise

The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre says only five to 10 per cent of victims report instances of fraud. However, acting client and communications outreach officer Nancy Cahill still encourages people to do so as fraud has been on the rise in recent years.

“People are meeting online, looking for love online, and we’re ordering online,” said Cahill.

According to Statistics Canada, fraud cases have almost doubled over the past decade, from 79,000 in 2012 to 150,000 in 2022. The increase shows scammers are becoming more skilled and artificial intelligence is helping them, according to the agency.

Despite the dangers, Summer Nickel, whose first concert was Taylor Swift at the age of seven, says she is not giving up her pursuit of tickets.

“I’m pretty desperate. I’m willing to pay a pretty penny for a ticket,” she said.