LUCKNOW: Following the unavailability of tickets for the league game between India versus England in Lucknow’s Ekana stadium, social media platforms including Facebook and X (formerly called Twitter) are flooded with spam posts, which were guaranteeing tickets in exchange for a good deal.
To gain the confidence of gullible cricket fans, the crooks are posting made-up stories, like-- friend ditched last minute, and there is extra ticket available. Direct message to buy it.
However, going the extra mile to mint cash, several spam posts also mentioned phone numbers to contact the seller of the ticket and make token payment of around 20 % via UPI and rest cash payment outside the stadium in exchange for a ticket to watch the World Cup clash.
The TOI team followed such an spam on Facebook posted by a crook who identified himself as Aryan Raikwar and was offering corporate box tickets at an actual price of Rs 40,000, and had posted his phone number.
When confronted, as to what profit he would gain if he was selling the ticket on actual price, Raikwar said, don’t worry about my profit, accept the deal or cut the call. A minute later in the conversation, Raikwar shared his g-pay number and asked to wire 20% of the total cost of the ticket and meet at Gate number 2 of the stadium with the remaining amount in exchange for the ticket.
There were other spam posts also, which offered cash delivery of the tickets at home.
Nishant Singh, a club level cricketer who waited for hours in queue to buy tickets before turning to social media posts, said, "Crisis for World Cup match tickets is happening because ICC chose to sell tickets online instead of through the counter. Now what happened afterwards was that the website https://tickets.cricketworldcup.com/explore/c/icc-cricket-world-cup started blocking everyone who had by mistakenly searched to buy tickets with wrong key words. So ultimately, fans turned up to social media posts to buy the tickets, which actually were spam."
According to a statement posted on the website: "It is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you (ticket buyer) just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. You (ticket buyer) can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page."
Meanwhile, there were still cases where people who had bought several (genuine) tickets were selling to the highest bidder with the help of a closed network and charging upto Rs 70,000 to Rs 1.25 lakh. TOI attempted to buy one such high-rate ticket, but since the seller got a whiff of the reporter, he chose not to engage further.
According to Ekana stadium authorities, corporate box ticket charges are around Rs 40,000, for lounge Rs 30,000, South lawn for Rs 18000, North lawn for Rs 15000, Presidential South gallery for Rs 8,000, Presidential North gallery for Rs 6,000 and normal ticket Rs 1,500.
