Festival season has started, and with it the high season for scammers. The moment an event sells out, "spare tickets" suddenly appear on classified sites and in social media groups. Sometimes real, often fake. To an organiser it can feel like someone else's problem — the fraud happens outside your ticket shop, after all. But it's your audience that gets burned, and it's your event that deals with disappointed people at the gate. Time to look at it plainly.
How big is the problem, really?
The numbers are sobering. Dutch police receive around 50,000 reports of online fraud each year, and roughly ten percent of those involve ticket fraud — figures shared by the police during an awareness campaign earlier this year. And that's just the visible part: it's estimated that only one in five victims files a report, because the amounts are often small enough that people assume it isn't worth it.
How stubborn the problem is became clear from the campaign itself. The police set up a fake webshop, TicketBewust.nl ("TicketAware"), and advertised it on Marktplaats — the Dutch equivalent of Craigslist. Between late October 2025 and mid-January 2026, more than 300,000 people saw that ad, and despite the built-in hints that it was a fake shop, Hart van Nederland reported that 3,432 people still tried to actually place an order. That eagerness to get into a sold-out event is exactly what scammers count on.
That this is no abstract threat is shown by a case from Utrecht. A 42-year-old man is suspected of fraud involving festival, concert and sports tickets. There are at least 153 reports against him according to Dutch broadcaster NOS, with damages of over 14,000 euros — and police suspect the real number of victims is far higher. He worked with dozens of bank accounts, phone numbers and aliases, and had been active since 2021. One person, hundreds of victims.
How scammers operate
The pattern is almost always the same. An event sells out, demand spikes, and "last tickets" appear on social media and resale sites. You pay up front by bank transfer or a payment-request link, and then one of two things happens: you never receive a ticket, or you get a PDF that looks genuine but simply won't scan at the gate — because it's a copy they sold to ten people at once.
That last one is the nastiest. The buyer thinks they hold a valid ticket, your QR system knows better, and the difference only surfaces at the worst possible moment: at the entrance, with a long queue behind them.
Why this is your concern
You could shrug it off — the transaction didn't go through you, so technically you owe nothing. But reputation doesn't work that way. Someone who bought a fake ticket for your festival mostly remembers the name of the festival, not the name of the scammer. And the visitor turned away at the gate tells that story to everyone.
What's more, this is exactly the gap that opens up when you don't offer a safe, official resale channel. A visitor who can no longer attend wants to offload their ticket; someone else wants one more. If you provide nowhere to do that, they'll find each other on classified sites — and that's where the scammers are waiting. The best protection, then, isn't to "ban resale" but to pull resale into a safe channel that you control. We wrote about that earlier in Reselling tickets safely — how it works at MijnEvent.
What you as an organiser can concretely do
You have more influence than you might think. A few things that genuinely make a difference:
Point your audience to one official channel, relentlessly
The golden rule given by both the police and Dutch consumer programme MAX Meldpunt is simple: only buy through the event's official channel. So make that channel crystal clear. One recognisable sales URL, prominent in all your communication, so nobody has to guess which link is the real one. Your own recognisable subdomain helps enormously here — see Setting up your own subdomain and branding if you haven't sorted that yet.
Communicate about fraud actively
Put out one level-headed message in your newsletter and on your socials: "Tickets are sold exclusively through this link. See them offered elsewhere? High chance of fraud." It takes five minutes and prevents a lot of misery.
Offer safe resale within your own platform
If visitors can resell their ticket safely through your shop — with a fresh, verified QR token for the buyer and an automatic refund for the seller — the reason to go to a classified site disappears. At MijnEvent, a resold ticket always gets a fresh token; the old one is invalidated. A copied PDF becomes worthless.
Let your QR validation do the heavy lifting
Real protection lives in the technology at the gate. Every MijnEvent ticket carries a unique token that's valid only once. Offer it twice, and the system raises the alarm. So a victim holding a fake ticket still doesn't get in — unpleasant for them, but it protects the integrity of your event and everyone who did pay honestly. How that works in practice is covered in Check-in and QR scanning for inspectors.
No panic, but stay alert
Ticket fraud is a stubborn problem, but no reason for doom-mongering. Most of it plays out on the very channels where you want to keep your audience away from anyway. By offering one clear official point of sale, communicating honestly about the risks, and keeping resale inside your own safe environment, you remove the breeding ground for most fraud. The rest your system catches at the gate.
Building your ticket sales on a platform with its own recognisable sales address, safe resale and watertight QR validation? Register your organisation or take a calm look at the pricing first — fixed cost per ticket, no surprises.