The scenario is all too familiar. You’ve booked flights and accommodation, you’ve carefully curated your outfits and consulted the clash finder to plan your weekend. You get to the entrance, pull out your ticket and…it’s a fake.
Alternative ways of entering a festival without a ticket has been a major problem for festivals since festivals began. People have scaled walls, tunnelled under fences and broke down barriers in a very literal sense. But with each year that passes each scam becomes much more sophisticated and harder to police.
Fans are still at risk of buying a dodgy wristband that’s already been used, but now ticket buying apps draw people in with a trusted logo only for those sites to be replicas. QR codes from legitimate tickets are bought, duplicated and sold to unsuspecting buyers. Examples of personal social media accounts being hacked and used to sell tickets to their friends and followers aren’t uncommon.
Earlier this year, Gothenburg’s Way Out West (WOW) wanted to draw attention to this issue with its Real Fake Tickets campaign. Real Fake Tickets offered previously scammed fans the chance to exchange their fraudulent tickets for real ones for its 2026 edition. Wannabe festival-goers would contact WOW with their personal stories, be entered into a competition and the ‘best’ story would finally get into the festival.
It might sound like a festival version of The Hunger Games, but Real Fake Tickets started as a campaign aimed to “shine a light on the growing problem of fake concert tickets,” says Filip Hiltmann, head of marketing at WOW.
WOW have something of a reputation when it comes to testing out unique experiments in the festival industry. They went meat-free in 2012 and last year offered free tickets to fans who pledged to donate an organ through their ‘Kidney Pass’ initiative.
While Real Fake Tickets began as a fun PR idea, through the personal stories that were being sent over the WOW team gained much deeper insight into the fan experience and the real, non-monetary cost that comes with fake tickets. There were stories of rent lost to invisible profiles and days and nights spent wandering alone through a city without friends by your side.
Filip says it’s most common for them to only know the true scale of the problem on the gate when fans are being turned away after the hotel and flights have already been booked. “Our ticket scams mostly get discovered when they come to the door and the ticket doesn’t work,” says Filip. “It’s such a hard thing to say to a fan who’s spent money that, I’m sorry, but you’ve been you’ve been scammed and we can’t let you in. And there are so many others examples though that we don’t see.“
I have personal experience with this. I once visited Amsterdam’s Dekmantel festival and needed a few extra tickets. We scoured Facebook, saw someone with a ‘spare’, their profile seemed legit so we made our way to the local Western Union to transfer the money.
Long story short, once the money was in their account all traces of this ‘ticket seller’ was gone. It was naive, but we were in our early-20s and, let’s say, groggy from the night before.
But the responsibility of guilt when falling for an invisible person’s scam is not on the fans, and it’s not just about lost money, says Filip. It’s the long walk home, the FOMO knowing your friends are having the times of their lives on the other side of a fence and a whole lot of disappointment. There’s also the embarrassment and frustration in being duped by a stranger over the internet. “So many people are afraid to talk about being scammed because they feel ashamed of what happened,” says Filip. “People feel like they should have done more, that they should have trusted their gut feeling when something didn’t feel right.”
Another part of this, thinks Filip, is down to festival communication around the topic. “Ticket scams are still something that festivals don’t talk about, apart from warning people not to buy fake tickets,” Filip says. “But what happens to the people who actually buy these tickets?“
Another realisation that WOW experienced through its Real Fake Tickets campaign is that in a way, festivals can become a victim of their own success. The WOW team first began to notice an influx of fakes and scams starting in 2022. That year, the first ‘proper’ post-COVID year with a crowd eager to leave the house, WOW sold many of its tickets far in advance. This meant tickets couldn’t be bought at the door, which gave scammers an opportunity to hook in desperate last-minute buyers and anyone hoping to join their mates over the weekend.
As the festival still sells out year-on-year, the problem keeps getting worse. “When we’re sold out, the ticket scammers see their opportunity to do their thing,” says Filip. “Through this campaign, we wanted to address and talk about something that affects us every year. [Ticket scams] are a real crime, and we want to take these people down.”
To Filip’s own admission, ticket scams don’t affect WOW in a monetary sense. A sold-out crowd is still a sold-out crowd on paper, after all. And while WOW “wanted to do the right thing” by drawing attention to this, the problem is difficult to solve.
WOW adopt what tactics they can in squeezing out the scammers, such as monitoring social media groups to search for telltale signs and flagging suspicious bot activity. But scams are, for obvious reasons, hidden enterprises that need the type of policing a weekend festival can’t provide.
This means further action is needed, thinks Filip. In the UK, the Stop! Think Fraud campaign from the UK Government and O2 urged fans to take caution over last-minute tickets being advertised on social media, and found that £150m was lost to ticket fraud in 2025. Research from Barclays also revealed that victims of ticket scams lose an average of £150. Gen Z (18-27) were hit the hardest, with 17% of consumers reporting they had fallen victim to a ticket scam.
Trying to tackle this problem, says Filip, is an example of why WOW and other festivals and exist not just as a global gathering but as a platform. “By being able to do campaigns like this, people know that we’re more than just a festival,” he says. “It shows that we stand for something and we do things that you wouldn’t expect. There’s so many festivals who live off their legacy, ones which have been going for 40 years. That’s totally uninteresting for us. We’re always asking how we can change this area? And how can we do this better?“
