Robbie Johnson was so excited about getting a ticket for a World Series game that he posted a photo of it on Instagram.
But when the Boston Red Sox fan arrived at Fenway Park for last week’s Game 2 against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Johnson discovered that the $650 ticket wouldn’t scan at the turnstile, Boston 25 News reported.
Alarmed by the rejection of his $650 ticket, the 28-year-old after-school instructor from Wellesley, Massachusetts, headed straight to the stadium’s ticket services booth to try to sort out the issue.
After analyzing the ticket, stadium staff told him it’d been scanned a couple of hours before he’d arrived.
It was then that Johnson realized he’d been scammed.
Someone had simply copied the details of the ticket from the photo that he’d posted on Instagram, details that included the ticket’s unique bar code, as well as seating details.
Now, you might be thinking: Why didn’t officials simply grab the miscreant from Johnson’s seat and turf him or her out of the stadium, making way for the person that actually forked out for the ticket? They took a look, of course, but the thief was crafty enough to move to another part of the stadium to escape detection.
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Johnson wasn’t allowed to take up his seat, and instead had to pay $450 for a new ticket.
“There are people who will do these things, which is unfortunate,” a disappointed Johnson told the news outlet, adding, “We were very excited about it, never been to a World Series [and it has] always been a lifelong dream of both of ours.”
April Martin of issuing company Ace Tickets told Boston 25 News that it recently started to warn customers about exactly this kind of theft.
Martin said that while it was fine to post an image of a ticket, it was important to cover important information such as the bar code and the seat location.
As for poor ol’ Johnson, he has acted with an apparent abundance of caution by setting his Instagram account to private, though the incident that caught him out is a useful reminder to everyone to think twice about posting such material on social media sites and other web-based services.
