‘Poof, gone;’ Customers say tickets on Ticketmaster were stolen out of their accounts

ATLANTA — Ticketmaster customers say their concert and event tickets are being stolen from their accounts after the company suffered a data breach earlier this year.

[DOWNLOAD: Free WHIO-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]

As reported on News Center 7 at 5:30, our sister station, WSB-2 in Atlanta, took a deeper look into the issue.

TRENDING STORIES:

• ‘Catastrophic failure’ of equipment causes explosion, fire at pharmaceutical business
• Police ID man killed in Riverside crash
• Hurricane Milton: Landfall expected on Wednesday

Eric Rein, of Canton GA, said the tickets he bought his daughter for Christmas as a present were stolen.

“Poof, gone,” he said.

Rein said the tickets were transferred out of his daughter’s account last week.

“She hadn’t initiated anything. Someone just accessed the account, and transferred the tickets,” Eric Rein said.

Gwinnett County resident Anne Wells’ tickets for Disney on Ice and Post Malone were marked as claimed in the app by someone else.

“I opened my Ticketmaster app to see for our tickets for the event on Sunday, and it said they had been claimed by this random name and they were gone,” Wells said.

Ticketmaster customers across the country have reported similar issues in recent days.

Seattle resident Virginia Lasky saw 14 tickets disappear.

“When I clicked on the tickets one by one it showed they had all been transferred and claimed,” she said.

In an SEC filing in the spring, Ticketmaster acknowledged a data breach of a third-party cloud database, according to WSB-2.

The hackers claimed to have stolen information of up to 500,000,000 Ticketmaster customers.

Ticketmaster tells WSB-2 that customer passwords were not exposed in the data incident.

Ticketmaster says in a statement, “Overall, our digital ticketing innovations have greatly reduced fraud compared to the days of paper tickets and duplicated PDFs. Having that digital history is also how we are able to investigate and successfully return tickets for fans.”

Customers say they are curious as to why there is no two-factor authentication required to transfer tickets that can be worth hundreds of dollars each.

“Once you purchase them, they’re really an asset. And you need to do everything you can personally to protect your assets, but you’re also relying on that company to help you with that,” Rein said.

[SIGN UP: WHIO-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]