Tennessee Theatre warns of ticket scams and major price hiking

KNOXVILLE — The Tennessee Theatre says hundreds of people have fallen victim to the tricks of third-party buyers, less fondly known as scalpers.

According to Becky Hancock, the theatre's executive director, modern technology has made the problem worse.

“It is very very hard to combat because of the modern computer techniques and the bots people use to buy tickets around the web,"

said Hancock.

“We sold fifty four tickets to someone in Hawaii for Allison Crouse. That definitely tipped off a red flag for us. I don’t think we would have sold fifty four tickets to real people in Hawaii coming to a real show in Tennessee."

A quick internet search shows the first few links at the top are not the theatre's website. Rather, the search yields pages to third-party ticket sellers that mark tickets up as high as $600-$800. The average VIP ticket for the theatre is priced around $150.

The fact that those sites look legitimate and the companies even have phone representatives makes many fall victim to something that is not technically illegal, but is a problem according to Hancock.

“What bothered me was this was supposed to be the pre-sale and we were already in the back of the theatre,"

said Bob Greenberg who fell victim to a scam in September before an Alison Krauss show.

He bought tickets through a third party site for about $135 per ticket, valued by the theatre at just $60-$80.

"Three days before the concert, we got an email from them saying we’re very sorry we’re going to refund your money but your tickets aren’t yours, we don’t have them from you we’re not going to send them to you,”

he said.

Greenberg was able to get his money back from the company. He also called the theatre and was able to buy legitimate tickets. However, many people aren't as lucky as Greenberg, according to the theatre.

“He was one of the lucky ones, the unlucky people are the ones that show up the night of the show with a ticket that’s not a good seat,"

said Hancock.

"If they did not buy the ticket from us, we can’t refund the money, it’s not our money.”

Hancock says the best way the theatre is able to combat the issue is by canceling sales to large ticket count purchases in far-away locations. However, she says the problem can only be fully solved by insuring no one buys tickets from third-party sites.

“This is not a Knoxville-unique problem-- it happens all over the country,"

she said.

“What we don’t like is when we haven’t even put a show officially on sale yet and we see tickets out there on the internet on sale. That is fraud."