Study: people miss 58% of fake tickets, wrongly flag 36% of real ones

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, consumers are far worse at spotting fake event tickets than most people would guess. A research working group meeting brought together academics studying two separate scam tactics: fraudulent tickets and robocall scripts, and both sets of findings point to the same conclusion. The tell is rarely on the surface. It has to be looked for in the right place, and most people are not looking there.

Professor Yaniv Hanoch presented three studies involving 604 participants, testing whether people could tell real event tickets from fraudulent ones. The first study found participants correctly identified only 42% of fraudulent tickets. Worse, 36% of genuine tickets were wrongly flagged as fake. The hardest scams to catch were the ones with non-existent seating, a problem invisible on the ticket itself. A second study tested whether time pressure and scarcity changed detection rates. It found no significant effect either way. That result matters: it suggests people are not failing to notice fake tickets because they are rushed. They are failing because the fake and the real often look the same.

A third study tested two interventions aimed at improving detection, and both worked. They raised the rate at which people spotted fraudulent tickets and cut the number of genuine tickets wrongly rejected. That is the useful finding buried in the numbers: detection is not fixed. It moves when people are shown what to check, which means the problem is not that fake tickets are unbeatable, it is that nobody has told most buyers what to look for.

The second presentation, from Ryan Moore and Dr Doug Shadel, analysed 4.49 million robocall transcripts, gathered from a honeypot of 295,749 decoy phone lines running between 2018 and 2022. The researchers compared scam robocalls with ordinary spam calls and found scam calls used more emotional pressure, more urgency, and more threats of loss. The starkest gap was in appeals to authority. These appeared in 73.8% of scams targeting older adults, against just 7.1% of scams aimed at the general public. That is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate script choice, built on the assumption that a claim to authority lands harder with an older listener than with anyone else.

The dataset predates generative AI becoming widely available, and the presentation raised what that shift could mean for robocall scripts going forward. Put the two studies side by side and a pattern appears. One shows that people cannot reliably judge a ticket by looking at it. The other shows that scammers tailor their approach by age, leaning hardest on authority when the target is older. Neither weakness is fixed by telling someone to be more careful. Both are fixed by knowing the specific tell in advance, whether that is a seating detail that does not exist or a caller claiming an authority nobody actually holds. This is the kind of pattern Flggd watches for: the identifiable habit within a scam, not just the isolated case.