Bills fan warns others about online ticket hackers

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — It's another big week for the Bills as they return home for a conference rivalry game against the Dolphins and tickets are selling fast.

The game was going to be the first for one Bills fan from Texas. However, her Ticketmaster account was hacked and her tickets stolen.

“I was just shocked," said Muleshoe, Texas Bills fan Baylee Helton. "You hear of this happening? I was like, it's not going to. I mean, what are the odds that it happened to me."

Despite living in Texas, Baylee Helton became a Bills fan two years ago, drafting Josh Allen for a fantasy team and watching every game since.

Never attending a game in person, she and her husband saved up money for over a year in order to be a part of Bills mafia. They spent over a thousand dollars on third row seats, right behind the Bills bench, before a hacker stole their tickets. 

“This morning, I got four emails saying that my tickets had been transferred and that they were approved," said Helton. "At first, I was like, this is probably spam. I'm not going to open it. So, I just logged into my Ticketmaster account and saw that my tickets were gone."

A quick search online and countless angry comments will pop up on Ticketmaster’s Facebook page about unwanted ticket transfers.

According to cyber security expert Arun Vishwanath, this is an ongoing issue nationwide.

“Ticketmaster itself got hacked," said Vishwanath. "There was a major breach. There were some 500 million customer data that got breached and there's a lawsuit that's ongoing right now. So, we still don't know the extent of the breach."

Vishwanath said the point of Ticketmaster is that it makes it easy for users to transfer tickets.

"The whole idea ... you can give tickets to people. But the problem is that process makes it easy to take a ticket once you get onto someone's account and just transfer it right out,” Vishwanath said.

Immediately after her tickets were stolen from her account, Helton contacted Ticketmaster.

“They said that they were going to push it through to their fraud department and they'd try and get back with me by November 3rd.," Helton said. "But that's the day of the game. And they said, 'There's no guarantee I can get your tickets back. And if not, we'll refund your ticket.'"

Helton says she won't trust Ticketmaster ever again saying, “The games in 72 hours. It doesn't really give you any kind of peace of mind that anything's going to get solved.”

WIVB News 4 checked multiple other resale ticket sites, checking if her seats were up for sale but could not find them.

Still, there are steps you can take to protect your tickets.

“The best thing to do in this case is good hygiene: use their app, change your password, have two factor authentication thrown into it, real time updates, biometrics. Use everything that you have at your disposal,” concluded Vishwanath.

If you experience a cyber-attack, you can also report it to the U.S government.

WIVB News 4 reached out to Ticketmaster asking if this is a widely known issue and what should be done, they have yet to respond.

Helton says, due to the trip being booked, she's still coming to Buffalo for the game, getting new tickets and hoping for a refund.