KANSAS CITY, Mo. (WDAF) — Recent ads on Craigslist for inexpensive tickets to Super Bowl LV raised red flags with the National Football League.
WDAF-TV in Kansas City sent the NFL’s Director of Intelligence Operations pictures of some of those ads — including one that offered four tickets for $2500 — to the February 7 Super Bowl matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Other ads that WDAF found on Craigslist over the weekend offered Super Bowl LV tickets for anywhere from $1,000 to $3,500 each and included multiple payment options through Apple Pay, Zelle, and Google Pay.
While the NFL’s Robert Gummer didn’t specifically call those ads scams, he did tell FOX4 he saw: “multiple red flags for these types of things as they happen every Super Bowl season.”
The first red flag, he said, is the “super low prices.”
Low prices like the ad that offered four Super Bowl LV tickets for $2,500 – or $625 each — for seats in section 343, row DD, in Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium.
WDAF checked for tickets in that section and row and discovered they cost $5,905 each on StubHub. That’s a difference of $5,280 per ticket.
Another red flag Gummer saw with the ads we sent him?
“Multiple payment methods,” he said. “People should only go through authorized sites, like Ticketmaster, StubHub, or through the formal ticket shops with the NFL,” Gummer said. “Third-party sights are likely scams 9 out of 10 times.”
Gummer also warned fans to be wary of buying tickets sight unseen.
“They (Super Bowl tickets) are all mobile this year,” he told FOX4. “But the fraud is still the same.”
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) said it received more than 200 reports of ticket scams last year. The BBB offered the following advice to protect consumers from getting taken in a ticket scam.