'Scammers cloned my event on Eventbrite'

Dear Which?

I was helping with a secondary school event to address teacher recruitment shortages. 

An attendee claimed to have paid for a ticket, so we let her in and invoiced her employer afterwards. The employer then produced evidence of having paid for a ticket – but it had paid scammers.

We found that a scammer had cloned the event on Eventbrite and even created a discounted ‘early bird’ ticket costing 25% less. 

I reported this to Eventbrite but was disappointed by its investigation. It refunded the attendee and said I could pursue her for the full fee. I chose not to do this as it was more than she was expecting to pay.

Following this, I noticed that my listing now had a verified user mark, but I feel there could have been more reassurance from Eventbrite about safeguarding its users from fraud.

It’s made me question whether we should continue to use Eventbrite to promote our courses.

Name supplied, Oxfordshire

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Faye Lipson, Which? senior researcher, says: 

A few weeks after your event was cloned, Eventbrite announced a pilot scheme in which some organisers on its platform would receive verified badges. This orange tick on the organiser’s profile picture comes with an assurance that Eventbrite has ‘confirmed their identity’. 

We found a few examples of the verified badge in use, but many organisers didn’t have one when we looked.

On its website, Eventbrite warns users to avoid scams by looking out for several red flags, including ‘deeply discounted tickets’ and ‘any deal which seems too good to be true’.

We spoke to Eventbrite and it said: ‘We have several layers of safety processes in place to protect the millions of event creators and consumers that use Eventbrite every year to organise, promote, and find events. The vast majority of the time, these safety processes detect and remove fraudulent events before they can do any harm. 

‘In this isolated instance, we didn’t catch the bad actor quickly enough, but did make sure that the one attendee who bought a fake ticket got their money back. We remain committed to the safety of our customers by improving our trust and safety processes every day, and hope to earn back [this customer’s] trust.’