Alex Trelinski
A FRAUDSTER conned at least 58 people by selling bogus music concert tickets online with customers getting nothing or at best- just a fake ticket.
A woman has been arrested by the Policia Nacional in an undisclosed town in Valencia province after investigations revealed she used 14 different numbers and seven bank accounts.
The con-artist sold the non-existent tickets on various online buying and selling platforms- and even made video calls with clients to give them the impression that they were doing business with a genuine person.
The number of victims is believed to be substantially more than the 58 identified so far by the police’s Central Cybercrime Unit.
They were contacted by a concert ticket buyer who paid the fraudster by depositing cash in her account via an ATM.
Once she got the money, the purchaser never got the tickets and blocked his phone number.
In many cases, those duped were also encouraged to pay her through a special code to a bank.
Once the transaction went through, the woman went to a specific ATM to enter the code to get the cash, which made identification difficult as the procedure was not linked to a named account.
Pouring through ATM videos, police observed she took extra precautions by wearing dark glasses, caps, and hoods to avoid a positive identification.
The fraudster started operating in January and police discovered she had received 130 payments from her unsuspecting victims.
For those people who actually got what appeared to be tickets, they then made long journeys to events, only to be turned away for having been palmed off with forgeries.
READ MORE:
- Dozens of Coldplay fans scammed with fake tickets in Barcelona
- Online Costa Blanca scammers sold fake tickets to festivals and shows in Spain
