Victim of Ticketmaster hack will get her Taylor Swift tickets returned

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A B.C. business owner and mother of two “Swifties” who thought she had lost several Taylor Swift and Usher tickets, worth more than $5,000, after her Ticketmaster account was hacked, got some good news Thursday afternoon.

Kiran Khatkar, who owns two businesses in Port Moody — Little Beans Play Cafe and St. James’s Well pub — says her family wanted to witness one of the biggest concerts in Vancouver’s history.

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Her two daughters, age six and seven, love to dance to their favourite singer. This summer, the pair of Swifties went to a Taylor Swift-themed dance camp and were counting the days until they could see their idol live on stage.

But Khatkar had to break the news to them Thursday morning that the tickets had been stolen from her account. The eldest daughter cried.

Khatkar, who had bought four Swift tickets and two Usher tickets from Ticketmaster, opened her email account Tuesday morning to discover 300 spam messages.

Later, she noticed on her online calendar that her Usher tickets had been deleted.

“I thought, ‘That’s strange, did my husband cancel our Usher concert and sell the tickets, or did Usher cancel the concert?’”

When she logged into her Ticketmaster account, she found out that all the tickets to Usher and Swift had been transferred out of her account by someone called “jk jk.”

Earlier, when she had been deleting the spam emails, she saw a reference to “jk jk” in the subject line, but thought nothing of it. She now suspects the hackers had flooded her with spam to prevent her from seeing the notification email about the transfer of tickets.

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Over two days, she had no luck speaking to a real person at Ticketmaster. But late Thursday, after inquiries by Postmedia, Ticketmaster’s fraud department notified Khatkar her tickets would be restored under her name.

“Now we’re ecstatic again. It’s been a whirlwind of a day,” she said.

At first, Khatkar wasn’t going to buy the Swift tickets because they were too expensive, but she said her husband convinced her that it would be worth it — the experience of a lifetime.

“We thought that it would be a really special way to have the girls go to their first concert. And with it being Taylor Swift, well, she’s just lit up the world in the last couple of years. I’d say this is the first artist that they’ve really fallen in love with.”

Despite the positive outcome, Khatkar still wants her story told to encourage other ticket holders to check their accounts and emails for any intrusions, and in case her stolen tickets had been re-sold fraudulently.

Her Swift tickets are in section 238, row P, seats 4 through 7. The Usher tickets are in section 106, row 15, seats 101 and 102.

Local authorities have issued several warnings about fake Swift tickets being sold online, urging people to be careful because they could lose hundreds or thousands of dollars.

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The B.C. RCMP’s E Division said it couldn’t comment specifically on how many complaints there have been about stolen concert tickets because of how they are filed under fraud or theft in their records system.

Earlier this summer, Ticketmaster warned Canadian customers that their data may have been compromised during a recent security breach.

An email sent by the ticket sales platform to customers in July stated “an unauthorized third party” had snagged information from a cloud database sometime between April 2 and May 18.

The email said the company determined on May 23 that some of its customers’ names, basic contact information, and payment card information, such as encrypted credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates, were part of the breach.

This came after Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, said in regulatory filings that on May 27 “a criminal threat actor” offered to sell Ticketmaster data on the dark web.

Several media outlets reported at the time that ShinyHunters, a cyberattack group thought to have formed in 2020, was behind the attack that allegedly scooped up data belonging to 560 million Ticketmaster users.

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ticrawford@postmedia.com

With files from Douglas Quan and The Canadian Press

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