Music festival tickets are four times more likely to be targeted by fraudsters than passes for sports.
A new report issued by Riskified, the eCommerce fraud prevention company, found that the growth of the global ticketing business has made it increasingly attractive to fraudsters, who can make purchases with stolen credit card information and then easily resell them.
Riskified reviewed hundreds of thousands of online event ticket orders and released its findings in its CNP Fraud in Event Ticket Sales 2017 report.
It found that sporting events are the safest category, where merchants can approve at least 95 per cent of orders. Theatre tickets came in second (with safe approval rates near 92 per cent), followed by concert tickets (88%) and festival tickets (77%).
Click here to read the report
“The differences between the categories are quite significant, with an 18 percent difference in approval rates between the safest and riskiest,” said a Riskified spokesperson.
“In fact, orders for festival tickets are four times more likely to be targeted by fraudsters when compared to orders for sporting event tickets, perhaps due to these mass events’ appeal to younger crowds. Nevertheless, merchants can and should approve four of five festival ticket orders.”
Riskified found that orders made 60 days prior to an event are – on average – worth over twice as much as orders placed on the event day, with approval rates for these orders four per cent higher.
As the day of the event nears, approval rates and order values steadily decrease, and the rate of fraud attacks leaps. A fraudster is five times more likely to be behind an order made on the day of an event than an order made 60 days before.
Approval rates remain steady in the final hours before the event, hovering between 91 and 93 percent.
Riskified said: “The reason behind this is likely that fraudsters are calculating: when they buy tickets online they need to leave themselves enough time to turn them for a profit.”
There was also a divergence in the risk of IP addresses registered in different countries. Orders from Israel and the US are the most trustworthy, with a 95.1 percent approval rate, while Portugal has an approval rate of just 81.8 percent. The UK scored 86.7 percent in this segment.
IMAGE: GotCredit
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