‘Carter is in tears’: Origin fans turned away from Suncorp Stadium, blame Ticketek hack
A Brisbane woman says she and her young son were turned away from the State of Origin decider at Suncorp Stadium after her Ticketek account was hacked and their tickets resold without her knowledge.
Nicola Healey from Griffin, north of Brisbane, arrived at Suncorp Stadium with her 11-year-old son Carter decked out in their Maroons gear on Wednesday night only to be turned away at the gates.
“My Ticketek account was hacked and my tickets were put up on Ticketek Marketplace and resold,” she said. “My poor son is devastated. This was his birthday present, purchased in February.”
A devastated 11-year-old Carter McPherson on the train home from Suncorp Stadium.
Healey said she was told her tickets had been cancelled and was directed to join a long queue of punters, where she was told she had listed her tickets on Ticketek Marketplace.
“I said, ‘no I did not!’”
Healey said the ticket office could not offer any remedy, directing her to police.
“I even asked [if they could] take us up to our original seats and kick [out] whoever was there. They said, ‘No, we can’t do that, they own the seats now.’”
Her devastated son was left in tears as they left the stadium.
“I spoke to a dad and his son on the way back to the train who had the same issue. I saw at least five groups get told their tickets were cancelled and the line had at least 100 people waiting who were sent from the gates to the box office,” she said.
Comment has been sought from Ticketek.
Asked on Thursday about reports of similar incidents, Queensland Deputy Police Commissioner Cheryl Scanlon said they were concerning.
“That’s a distressing thing for anybody, particularly when you’ve paid out significant amounts of money, so those things need to be addressed and reported,” she said.
“It’s very disappointing to hear that, it’s very disappointing for the organisers of those events, but also if you’re a mum and dad and you’ve paid out good money for something ... if that’s the case, we’d expect there would be reports today to us about that.”
Scanlon said it was best to buy tickets off legitimate and reputable suppliers of tickets.
Ticketek Marketplace is a secondary site operated by Ticketek that enables people to legally resell and buy tickets for up to 10 per cent more than their original face value.
Once tickets are resold, the original barcode is cancelled.
Ticketek was the target of a major data hack last month, which exposed the private details of thousands of customers.
At the time, Ticketek said information belonging to Australian customers, including names, birth dates and email addresses, had been taken from a cloud-based platform “hosted by a reputable, global third-party supplier”.