Jessica Shy's concert at Vingis Park left a bitter taste for a fan – felt like being hit in the face with a wet rag

About this situation, which he encountered upon arriving at the event, Raimundas Sakalauskas openly shared on the social network “Facebook.” He agreed to share the post with the news portal Žmonės.lt.

He said that arriving at the event with a group, he learned shocking news – six out of seven pre-purchased tickets had already been scanned by other people. The man is convinced that his tickets were not stolen, but this is merely an error in the distribution system during mass purchasing.

“Bilietai.lt” is engaged in a simple scam. The Jessica Shy concert was a bit bitter for our group – Eglė Žukauskaitė bought 7 tickets during pre-order. On the concert day, upon arrival, the check said that 6 tickets had been used by 6 different people and that we probably passed or sold the tickets to someone. We ourselves handed over the tickets at the concert; that rainy day, of course, we came with 3 small children just before the main performer’s concert… But let me start from the beginning.

At the venue, of course, no one could help, they told us to contact by email. By email, of course, the answer was the same – they cannot help. On our side, we conducted a basic security audit:

There is no “Bilietai.lt” account – it could not have been hacked, the purchase was anonymous, only with an email. This would have been the weakest link in the whole process, so we started there.
The phone is an “iPhone” – although not impossible, it is not a very realistic attack vector.
The email was “Gmail” – after reviewing the list of authorized devices and email notifications with “attempted sign-in blocked” or “a new sign in,” all devices are those we actually use, and there are no suspicious devices.

While standing at the ticket check trying to buy the 6 missing tickets from ads, another quite respectable-looking group (neatly dressed older people) came with the same story – tickets were bought during pre-order and 3 of them had already been used. We bought the last ticket from them, explaining that we had just spent an hour in the rain with children trying to get into the concert, and the only solution was to buy other tickets.

Since I was not allowed to go with my family to clarify at the kiosk (i.e., after scanning that one valid ticket, one person had to enter the concert, and some human factors, that, guys, we have many children, we all need to be at the booth, did not work), and the concert was already starting, there was no more crowd – I had time to talk with the ticket-checking staff.

They said that in many years of work, despite encountering ticket scams, they had never seen a case where tickets in one PDF were scanned in 6 different places. It is not impossible that stolen tickets were sold to six different people, but realistically – what are the chances? Especially when there were even 2 identical situations at that checkpoint.

At the kiosk, there was also a girl who had bought pre-order tickets from hands. When the tickets did not work, the person from whom they were bought immediately refunded her money. So buying from hands carries increased risk, but in this case, since the money was refunded, the person who sold the tickets clearly did not intend to deceive this girl.

I do not know the context of the other two stories, but I know that our tickets were not stolen. They were probably just sold twice.

“Bilietai.lt,” WTF? As a programmer, I would bet most that you have “race conditions” in the system that appear when trying to sell 50,000 tickets in 20 minutes. And if something does not work, it is very easy to shift the responsibility to the buyer by saying, “probably your account was hacked.”

The moral of the story – tickets should only be bought with a credit card because in such a situation a “chargeback” is probably the only way to recover money from dishonest sellers.

EDIT: A participant in one of the situations I mentioned appeared. Still, they only had 1 ticket used out of 4. Then they agreed to sell one to us, and 2 people from their group went to the concert,” wrote R. Sakalauskas on the social network “Facebook.”

The news portal Žmonės.lt contacted bilietai.lt regarding this situation. After receiving a response, we will update the article.

Jessica Shy – shots from two concerts at Vingis Park