Good morning. A year has passed since fans of Taylor Swift lost thousands of dollars in the mistaken belief they were buying tickets to her Canadian concerts. In focus today, we look at how bots, bulk selling and scalpers have pushed fans into riskier markets.

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Hi, I’m Mariya Postelnyak, The Globe and Mail’s consumer affairs reporter. My beat often involves covering scams, their lasting impacts on victims and the institutional gaps that leave people vulnerable.

For the last few months, I’ve been a fly on the wall to the whiplash that comes with being a “Swifty.” It started last spring, when I was invited to join a group chat created in the aftermath of a scam that saw more than a hundred Taylor Swift fans in Ontario collectively pay upward of $300,000 for Eras Tour tickets they’d never receive.

The cost of a scam

In addition to paying thousands of dollars for tickets, Swift fans I spoke to spent hundreds on hotels, transport and babysitters. Some, I learned, even booked cross-country flights. Then came the panicked calls and e-mails: the seats had fallen through.

By the time police got involved, fans had already started their own sleuth work. A group chat was born for swapping notes, sharing screenshots and mapping out financial losses.

If you spend any time around Swift fans, you’ll know this sort of DIY work isn’t unusual. Sky-high demand for the artist’s shows has collided with short supply, strained further by bots and scalpers, often forcing fans to lean on one another.

Year in review

Last year, Swift fans built volunteer-run Instagram and TikTok accounts to help people trade safely at face value. When the alleged scam unravelled, they were also the first to piece together what happened.

What’s known is this: Before e-transferring a woman known online as “Denise Blackhawk” between $1,700 and $15,000, Swift fans who spoke with The Globe waited in Ticketmaster queues and chased presale codes only to watch tickets appear on resale sites for double or triple the price.

Because of how difficult it is to buy tickets through official platforms, DIY efforts to get Swift tickets are incredibly common, and people often rely on word of mouth, group chats or online communities to learn of ways to get seats.

It’s why it wasn’t all that odd for fans to turn to online resellers after being priced out and timed out of ticketing portals.

Scalpers have been around forever. When Charles Dickens toured the U.S. in the 1860s, thousands lined up for tickets while “sidewalk men” paid people to hold spots, bumping prices from US$5 to US$50.

What’s different now is the sheer volume of automated brokerage accounts and scalpers scooping up tickets at scale. Only a handful of companies have the power to stop them (and often have little incentive to do so).

A broken system

Denise Blackhawk’s account, victims learned, was allegedly tied to 44-year-old Burlington, Ont., resident Denise Tisor. Today, she faces charges in Toronto amounting to 42 counts of fraud and 42 counts of possession of property obtained by crime. She was not the only one arrested.

So while some blame overly eager Swifties for treading into unsafe territory, this case highlights a ticketing system where bots and bulk buyers push fans toward unsafe markets, and sellers have little reason to weed out bad actors.

In its 2024 budget, the federal Liberal government vowed that it would crack down on fraudulent resellers. But when we contacted Department of Finance official Marie-France Faucher, she said, “it would be inappropriate at this time to speculate on what may or may not be under consideration.”

At their worst, online communities can become a breeding ground for scammers. At their best, they’re a space for fans to share tips for safely getting their hands on Swift tickets while commiserating about the experience of being a fan of an artist whose shows are routinely sold out.