Lianne Batista, pictured in her Toronto home last week, was allegedly scammed while trying to buy Taylor Swift concert tickets for herself and her teenage daughter.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
When Lianne Batista first heard about the tickets, she perked up, then immediately tensed.
The mother of three was visiting the same Toronto hairdresser she’d seen for 23 years. The pair had grown close, trading stories as hair was teased, trimmed and dyed.
The hairdresser knew Ms. Batista’s daughter was a die-hard Swiftie – the kind that knew all the Easter eggs hidden across Taylor Swift’s albums – and that she’d been saving and scavenging for months to snag tickets to the pop star’s Eras Tour stop in Toronto last November, just two months away.
“His client had a friend who was selling,” Ms. Batista said, recalling her excitement, but also skepticism. “Do you think it’s legit?”
By then, she had braced through hour-long online Ticketmaster queues, chased secret access codes and was always on alert for surprise drops in hopes of scoring last-minute tickets.
But Ms. Batista was determined. The concert would be a chance to reconnect with her teenager. The two saw little of each other after her daughter landed her first full-time job.
She took the plunge and reached out to the mutual contact, who eventually connected her with a woman who called herself “Denise Blackhawk.”
What followed was a months-long nightmare that Ms. Batista alleges cost her more than $2,000, left her teen reeling just days before the show and etched a lasting sense of shame that she shared with dozens of other fans who learned that they‘d paid for tickets they’d never receive. Collectively, victims linked to this single scam allegedly lost more than $300,000 across Toronto and Halton region, according to estimates provided to The Globe and Mail by Toronto Police based on an initial review of bank records. Confirmed losses totalled $258,790.
Fans wait outside Toronto's Rogers Centre on Nov. 14, 2024, before seeing Taylor Swift perform during the first Toronto date of her Eras Tour.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
The case has put a spotlight on a broken concert ticketing system in which bots and bulk selling push fans to unsafe secondary markets quickly and where ticket sellers have little incentive to root out bad actors.
According to figures from police services across Ontario, Ms. Batista’s complaint was one of more than 110 in the province pertaining to a Facebook profile that used the name Denise Blackhawk. Consumers who spoke with The Globe claimed to have transferred the person running the account between $1,700 and $15,000 for Eras Tour tickets after being timed out and priced out of ticketing giant Ticketmaster and secondary resale platforms.
Not long after the Eras Tour began, the federal Liberal government in its 2024 budget vowed that it would crack down on fraudulent resellers.
Those plans appear to have changed. When contacted by The Globe for this story, Department of Finance official Marie-France Faucher said, “it would be inappropriate at this time to speculate on what may or may not be under consideration.”
She said that the federal government treats fraud “with the utmost seriousness” and is “constantly reviewing” fraud-prevention and mitigation measures.
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Observers, meanwhile, are calling for closer scrutiny of how ticketing giants stand to benefit from bots and revisiting solutions written off as unenforceable, such as ticket price caps and experimenting with batch sales. Others say the only solution lies in stronger penalties for sellers, as well as ticketing giants, who break the rules.
Last year, the average listing price for November tickets to the Eras Tour in Toronto and December dates in Vancouver hovered at around US$6,351, and the minimum price was about US$1,690, according to resale-ticket aggregator and data provider TicketIQ. For perspective, the average monthly mortgage payment across Canada stood at around $2,040, according to data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.
After paying hundreds of dollars for tickets, hotels, carpools, babysitters, trains and even cross-country flights, alleged victims of Denise Blackhawk all received panicked calls and messages days or hours before the show, either from friends and relatives or the accused herself.
“Yes, it’s true – there’s no tickets,” Ms. Batista said she was told bluntly in an e-mail from the woman who sold her the seats.
Ms. Batista's complaint was one of more than 110 in Ontario linked to a single Facebook profile, according to data from police services across the province.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
Denise Blackhawk’s account, victims learned, was allegedly tied to 44-year-old Burlington, Ont., resident Denise Tisor. Today, Ms. Tisor faces charges in Toronto amounting to 42 counts of fraud and 42 counts of possession of property obtained by crime.
Police also arrested and laid charges against 56-year-old David Lloyd Blake of Burlington, who faces 19 counts of possession of property obtained by crime.
When reached by The Globe on the phone, Ms. Tisor and her lawyer, Kim Edward, individually declined to comment on the specifics of the case. The allegations have not been proven and the matter is still before the courts in Toronto, Milton and Barrie.
Ms. Tisor and Mr. Blake both face charges in Southern Ontario’s Halton Region, including one count each of money laundering. Local police there recorded 55 confirmed incidents of fraud linked to Denise Blackhawk’s Facebook profile.
Ms. Swift performs in Toronto on Nov. 14. One expert says overwhelming demand for the shows played into the problem with resale tickets.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Fraud victims often blame themselves and Ms. Batista says she felt that guilt personally. “There’s a lot of embarrassment.”
But many of the alleged victims insist they were not scammed by a stranger. Some of their kids played hockey with the accused’s or went to the same school, and some victims even say they bought tickets from her in the past.
Susan Harper, who ended up e-transferring around $15,000 for tickets for herself and several girlfriends, had chatted online with Denise Blackhawk long before the purchase. They liked each other’s Facebook posts and mingled in some of the same circles, Ms. Harper said.
To ease any doubts about the legitimacy of the transaction, Ms. Batista spoke to people who previously bought tickets from Denise Blackhawk. Her hairdresser showed her that Denise Blackhawk was part of the Leaside moms Facebook group, a closed group for parents in an affluent Toronto neighbourhood.
“It wasn’t that we were just like being catfished,” said Ms. Harper.
Before losing money to the scam, Ms. Harper said she had tried to find tickets on Ticketmaster and, later, StubHub, where nosebleed seats were going for close to $3,000 each.
“The reason that you go to a secondary market is primarily because the brokers bought all these tickets up and made them unavailable to the public in the first place,” said Kenneth Wong, professor emeritus of marketing at Queen’s University’s Smith School of Business.
By his estimates, only about 25 per cent of tickets are being sold and redeemed at face value. “If Ticketmaster had better controls over a maximum per purchase and resale values that would be a whole different game,” he said.
The fans who unknowingly turned to scams did so often after being locked out of official ticketing platforms and resellers due to inflated prices.
Swifties participate in the pop star's Nov. 14 show in Toronto. While many analysts agree there are issues with the way tickets to such shows are sold and resold, there’s disagreement on how to solve them.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
According to Ticketmaster data, more than 3.5 million people applied for verified presale codes, and more than two million tickets were sold in just one day, during the initial sale for the first U.S. leg of Ms. Swift’s tour.
Even people who did get their hands on tickets eventually stood in virtual queues for hours. Some told The Globe they watched, waiting, as dozens of tickets trickled to StubHub and other resale platforms for double and triple the price.
A limited number of no-view seats for Ms. Swift’s final tour dates in Vancouver were released for $16.50 apiece. The tickets were swept up in minutes before reappearing on resale platforms such as StubHub for up to $3,000. (Ticketmaster did not participate in resale for the Eras Tour in North America.)
Scalpers are endemic to showbiz. When author Charles Dickens went on a U.S. reading tour in the 1860s, about 5,000 fans reportedly began lining up to buy tickets while murky “sidewalk men” paid bystanders to wait in queues, raising resale market prices from US$5 to US$50.
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What’s new is the mass-scale purchases by automated brokerage accounts, or bots, that are getting ever more sophisticated and few companies that have the authority to keep the bots in line.
Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment Inc. LYV-N, have long been scrutinized for not doing enough. Their merger in 2010 allowed the companies to wield dominance over virtually all major concert venues in North America, and around 80 per cent of major venues’ primary ticketing.
But recently, there’s been mounting scrutiny around whether the company willfully turned a blind eye to the problem.
A lawsuit filed in September by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleged that the entertainment giant made hundreds of millions of dollars from “tacitly” co-ordinating with ticket brokers to allow the brokers to harvest tickets in its primary market. (In a statement, Ticketmaster said it “stepped up its fight” against scalpers and bots with AI and tougher rules. The company said 60 billion bot attempts were stopped year-to-date in 2025, up 20 times since 2022.)
Ticketmaster benefits twice on brokered sales: the initial commission and then fees via the transfer portal, which amounts to a sort of “double dipping,” said Mr. Wong.
The FTC alleged in its complaint that when reselling tickets bought by brokers, Ticketmaster could actually “triple dip” on fees, collecting cash when brokers purchase tickets, then sell them on Ticketmaster’s platform, and, finally, from consumers.
Internal documents cited by the FTC show that Ticketmaster employees analyzed the impact of enforcement. If they cracked down on the way major brokers were circumventing controls, it would lead to a nearly US$220-million drop in annual resale ticket revenue.
Concluding that capping brokers’ resale ticket listings would have “[s]erious negative economic impact,” Ticketmaster chose not to.
Almost a year after the Eras tour ended, Ms. Batista says she remains mistrustful from her experience.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
In an October letter, Dan Wall, Live Nation’s executive vice-president, corporate and regulatory affairs, told U.S. senators the FTC complaint presented “a distorted view of the facts.” Ticketmaster, in its e-mailed statement to The Globe, said the company has “consistently supported stronger regulation of the resale market and welcomes conversations with governments and regulators to advance protections that safeguard event organizers and fans.”
While many analysts agree that there are glaring issues with the way concert tickets are sold and resold, there’s disagreement on a solution.
In 2017, Ontario’s then-Liberal government tried to cap ticket resale prices at 50 per cent above their face value. But the rule was deemed “unenforceable” by the Progressive Conservative government that came to power the following year, and eventually scrapped in 2019.
However, commonly cited U.S. reports that suggest caps are hard to enforce rely largely on research conducted in or before 2010 and as far back as the 1990s, with the authors admitting “such a cap might be easier now because the secondary market is largely on the internet.”
The Ontario government is now exploring the idea of resurrecting this legislation.
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In Europe, price caps may have proved promising, though some say demand for tickets was slightly smaller. In May last year, Billboard magazine calculated that the price to see the opening of the Eras Tour’s European leg was US$340 a ticket, 87-per-cent cheaper than the U.S. average. Urged by artists such as Coldplay, the British government announced plans this week to outlaw reselling tickets to live events for a profit.
On the other hand, some research suggests that restricting verified resellers pushes buyers into unregulated markets, with ticketing fraud almost four times higher in jurisdictions with price caps.
Whether or not it’s through regulated or unregulated channels, “overwhelming demand will still encourage some fashion of balancing,” said Jeremy Peters, assistant professor of music business at Detroit’s Wayne State University.
He’s seen promise with the artist-side strategy of selling batches of tickets over a longer period, recently implemented by artists such as Chappell Roan. “This process splits the demand up over time, which increases the likelihood of an average fan being able to buy,” said Mr. Peters.
It’s undeniable that the overwhelming demand for Ms. Swift’s shows played into the problem. “Demand exceeding supply, the time pressure … you can really create a kind of feeding frenzy,” said Mr. Wong.
But, he said, “the real problem here is Ticketmaster is doing things which constrain the supply.”
In its statement, Ticketmaster said it supports policies that give artists, their teams and venues more control over how tickets are sold and resold.
Danielle Zanzalari, an economics professor at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University who’s studied price caps, said the primary fix lies in enforcement. “Price caps can actually make it less inclusive,” she said. “If you’re not the first person in line.
“Authorities have to enforce the rules [so] you don’t have anti-competitive behaviours,” she said.
Some Swifties, meanwhile, have taken matters into their own hands, organizing volunteer-run accounts on Instagram and TikTok to facilitate safe, face-value trades.
Almost a year after the Eras Tour ended, the events have left Ms. Batista rattled and mistrustful. But she said the ordeal couldn’t ruin the memories she made with her daughter preparing for the concert: crafting bedazzled outfits, singing their way through more than a decade of Ms. Swift’s records and gushing over the night to come.
No scam could “take all that away from us,” said Ms. Batista.