BUYING concert tickets can be a stressful experience for dedicated fans.

As a frequent concertgoer myself, I can relate to the struggles of dealing with presales, surge pricing, and bots, but I wasn’t prepared for the issues that came with selling tickets.

A friend and I bought Doja Cat tickets for her Scarlet Tour at the Barclays Center.

We wound up being unable to go, so we decided to sell the tickets with the hope of getting some of our money back.

Live Nation, the ticket-buying app where we got the tickets, has a built-in selling feature, but we wanted to try our hand at selling them on our own first.

I shared that I was selling tickets on a Reddit thread made specifically for concert tickets on the Doja Cat subreddit.

But, I didn’t get a response.

So, I made a similar post on X, formerly known as Twitter, and was excited to get a new follower within an hour of the post.

Because of the new rules on X, users who aren’t subscribed to the premium service can’t send private messages to other users they don’t follow, so I followed the person back.

We’ll call this individual JD.

It all started with them asking if the tickets were still available.

We went back and forth, with me giving all the details I had on the tickets – section, row, and seat number.

I also gave her live confirmation through a video that the tickets were real.

Finally, after settling on a price and payment method, JD told me her friend would be buying the tickets and gave me their phone number.

“She will have to text you for payment and send her the info for you to ticket transfer,” JD wrote to me.

I gave JD my phone number to give to her friend and I waited for a text, relieved that I would be getting rid of these tickets.

JD’s friend messaged me a few hours later and we went over the price that JD and I agreed.

It was also confirmed that the money would be sent through Zelle.

This is when I started to feel a bit uncomfortable with the situation. My gut told me that something was off.

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The individual took several hours between messages to respond, and only seemed to message me at night, sometimes at two in the morning.

I gave the friend my email to send the money through Zelle, and they said they sent the money with a Bank of America screenshot as proof, however, the screenshot was blurry, which also raised even more red flags.

Even worse, despite Zelle transferring money instantaneously, I never received confirmation of payment.

I refreshed my bank statement a hundred times and never found a new transaction matching the agreed-upon total.

I messaged JD’s friend, telling them about the situation and they quickly flooded me with messages saying the money was sent despite me not receiving anything.

“I got a mail with this receipt that I have to complete the minimum receipt limit of $500 by sending $200 more to you because you are not using Zelle for business and you are receiving from me a Zelle business user,” the person wrote.

That’s when I got extremely worried.

I researched Zelle scams on Google to see if any of the red flags I noticed were common scam traits.

One involved the scammer sending the victim more money than they agreed upon and asking for the victim to send the difference.

In my case, we agreed upon sending $300 but JD’s friend said they would send $500 with me sending $200 back.

Another scam involved the fraudster getting access to your Zelle account and changing the password to lock the victim out.

“Since the locked-out account is still connected to your bank account, you’ll be the one footing the bill for the scammer’s spending spree,” read a report from Aura.

Changing the passwords for my email, bank, and Zelle accounts, I sent a message to JD and her friend that I would not be moving forward with the transaction.

“I don’t feel comfortable going through with this transaction. I don’t think it should have taken this long to make what seems to be a clear-cut transaction.”

I still don’t know if JD and her friend were actually trying to scam me but there were so many red flags and not enough communication.

After giving my word that I didn’t receive any money – which I still haven’t over a week later – I unfollowed JD from X and have not heard from either her or her friend since.

As of writing, one of the tickets is still available.

The U.S. Sun has written several stories on similar scams with advice on how to avoid them.