Dutch police trick thousands into buying fake football and Lady Gaga tickets

Thousands of eager football and music fans have been scammed. However, fortunately for them, it was by the Dutch Police. This educational tactic, borrowed from the fraudsters’ playbook, worked a little too well, reaching 300,000 people.

The Dutch Police’s experiment demonstrated how easy it is to trick people into parting with their money just by offering “exclusive tickets” to “sold-out” concerts featuring artists like Lady Gaga, Typhoon, and Roxy Dekker.

The police set up a fake ticket sales platform, TicketBewust.nl, that mimics a real online shop. It was offering cheap, hard-to-get tickets for concerts and football matches, but everything was deliberately fake.

The police even placed fake ads on Marktplaats, which is the Netherlands’ largest online classifieds platform. Malvertising is often used by real scammers to lure victims to fake websites.

The results speak for themselves:

• More than 300,000 people saw the ads with attractive deals for “Always the best tickets at the best price” between October 30th, 2025, and January 11th, 2026.
• Over 30,000 people clicked on the ad to view it.
• 7,402 of these clicks led to the fake website.
• 3,432 times people actually tried to book a ticket.
• The buyers were redirected to a police warning page explaining how ticket scams work and how to avoid them.

It’s not the first time the Dutch police have launched a similar fake web store. A year earlier, pakjedealsnu.nl imitated an online marketplace to educate people about online purchase fraud.

Each year, police in the Netherlands receive around 50,000 complaints of online fraud. Around 10% of them involve ticket scams.

“In reality, the problem is even larger, as an estimated 80% of ticket fraud victims never report it, often because the financial losses are relatively small,” Gijs van der Linden, team leader of the National Internet Fraud Reporting Center, said in a press release.

"The fake website was created because we see how clever and convincing scammers operate."

Scammers use similar tactics to those of TicketBewust.nl. They can promote fraudulent offers for highly sought-after goods or services, deploy highly convincing fake platforms at scale.

“The offers on the site are too good to be true,” Van der Linden explains.

“For example, we only ‘sell’ tickets to sold-out concerts. Observant visitors can also spot other hidden clues that it’s a fake webshop.”

The police recommend that users always visit the event organizer's official website before purchasing a ticket and be wary of offers from other sites and platforms, especially when the events are sold out.

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