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She transferred over $700 over PayNow to see her idol, but never received the tickets
Concert ticket scams accounted for over one in 10 e-commerce scams reported in the first half of 2026, according to Singapore Police Force’s data.
Jan Lee, Brand Newsroom
Dai Yujing, 31, thought she had found the perfect way to celebrate her friend’s birthday: Two adjacent tickets to Taiwanese quartet F*Forever’s sold-out concert in Singapore, close to their original price.
Instead, the Singaporean accountant lost over $700 after transferring the money to a seller on Telegram. She paid through funds transfer service PayNow, which made her feel safer, she says.
Dai never received the tickets.
It started a week before the Aug 15 show, she recalls. She sought two adjacent seats in a Telegram group of over 100 fans looking to buy, sell or swap F*Forever tickets.
A seller named Andi messaged her, offering two such seats at $358 each, she says. Screenshots of the tickets looked legitimate to her.
The seats mattered. Dai and her two friends had already bought tickets through authorised platform Ticketmaster when sales opened in June, but the seats were separate.
She did not want one friend, whose birthday fell on show day, to sit alone.
Dai asked to pay for one ticket first, but the seller insisted she pay for both before sending her the tickets, she says.
Pressed for time, Dai went ahead and transferred the money.
“It was one week before the concert, and my friends couldn’t sell their existing tickets until I had secured the adjacent seats,” she says.
Andi blocked her on Telegram after. Dai immediately reported the incident to the police and called her bank, but the money was gone, she says
Preying on ‘FOMO’
Dai is not alone. Among 3,865 e-commerce scams reported in the first half of 2026, 483 involved concert tickets, resulting in losses of $328,000, according to Singapore Police Force’s (SPF) data.
Concert ticket scams can be hard to curb, says Jeffery Chin, deputy director of SPF’s Scam Public Education Office.
Such scams often occur when buyers face high demand, limited availability and the pressure to act quickly – conditions that can trick even seasoned concert-goers, he explains.
“When a show is sold out, the perceived cost of missing out overrides rational caution,” he says.
Fans may turn to unofficial channels in a bid to see their idols, he adds. Scammers prey on this by pushing buyers to pay fast, claiming tickets are limited, in high demand, or time-sensitive.
SPF has reached out to online platforms like Carousell, Facebook Marketplace and TikTok to remove resale concert ticket listings.
In Dai’s case, she had waited over 20 years for the F*Forever reunion. The group featured three leads of the popular Taiwanese idol drama, Meteor Garden (2001), and rock band Mayday’s frontman Ashin.
Their three sold-out Singapore Indoor Stadium shows, held from Aug 14 to 16, drew 33,000 fans.
Perceived safeguards
Paying via PayNow was partly why Dai let her guard down, she says.
She thought the transaction could be traced because PayNow profiles are linked to a bank account or e-wallet in Singapore through identifiers like mobile numbers or NRIC.
But a PayNow number, Unique Entity Number (UEN), QR code or displayed account is not proof that the recipient is legitimate, SPF’s Chin says.
A UEN is an official identification number assigned by the Government to entities like businesses, charities, and societies.
While the police can identify the PayNow account holder, that person may not be the scammer, he says.
He explains: “Scammers, particularly those operating as part of organised syndicates, may make use of bank or payment accounts belonging to other persons, commonly referred to as money mules, to receive and move scam proceeds.”
Dai was not the only victim who believed PayNow was a safeguard.
Hours before American pop diva Mariah Carey’s Singapore concert last October, a 32-year-old Singapore permanent resident, who wants to be known only as Paul for privacy reasons, responded to a ticket listing off online marketplace Carousell.
Paul, a self-employed public relations professional, was told to transfer $250 to a UEN via PayNow.
He complied but never received the ticket.
Paul thought he had done his checks. He recalls searching the UEN on the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority’s (ACRA) Bizfile portal. It belonged to a registered educational support company, and he thought it could be traced.
He says: “I don’t consider myself someone susceptible to scams. The fact that the sale was through PayNow UEN, even if it wasn’t foolproof, gave me some distance away from the feeling of being easy prey.”
Paul reported the scam to police, but did not recover his money.
Dai feels she should have been more vigilant.
She later realised that Andi’s screenshots differed slightly from those on the actual Ticketmaster site.
She was still riding the high of an F*Forever show in Kuala Lumpur when the scam happened.
“I was not exactly paying full attention,” she says.
This is part of a series titled “Act against scams”, in partnership with the Singapore Police Force and the National Crime Prevention Council.