Madonna ticket-scam suspect busted

Suspect de faux billet de Madonna arrêté.

Juvenile arrested in sting operation on Pearl Street
By John Aguilar
Friday, October 31, 2008 

A juvenile accused of selling two fake VIP tickets for Madonna’s upcoming concert at the Pepsi Center to a Boulder woman was busted earlier this week in an alley off Pearl Street, where, police say, he had shown up to collect additional payment from his victim.

The suspect was arrested on suspicion of theft and taken to the Boulder County Juvenile Center. Police discovered he already had a warrant out for his arrest.

Marissa Yanick, 33, said she wanted to get as good a seat as possible at one of Madonna’s concerts, which are taking place Nov. 11 and 12 at the Pepsi Center in Denver. She decided to hit the online classifieds site www.craigslist.org on Oct. 24 to look for deals.

“If you are going to see Madonna, there’s only one way to do it — up close,” she said.

Yanick agreed to buy a pair of VIP tickets for $400 off the site from someone who claimed to have won them in a contest and didn’t want to go to the concert. She received an e-mail confirmation a few hours later from a legitimate-looking e-mail address explaining how to obtain her tickets.

That night she met the seller at the Ogden Theater in Denver, where she was attending a concert, and gave him half the payment while agreeing to give him the rest later.

The next day, Yanick began to suspect that the transaction was a scam when the young man asked if she would send him a blank check or a wire transfer for the remaining $200.

She tried to contact someone through Madonna’s Web site and had no luck. Then she called the Pepsi Center and learned that there had been reports of a ticket scam involving VIP passes in Denver.

Yanick had her friend contact the CraigsList seller and ask for the same VIP tickets that had apparently been sold to her. She said the suspect agreed to sell them again to her friend.

Yanick called Boulder police, who called the Pepsi Center and found out they were in fact dealing with a scam. An officer agreed to stake out the Wells Fargo Bank at 1290 Pearl St. on Tuesday while Yanick met the seller to give him the rest of the payment.

The young man was arrested on the spot.

Yanick said she wished she could have kept the police out of it, but she didn’t see how else she was going to get her money back.

“Nobody likes to be in a situation like that,” she said. “I’ve got 100 things I’d rather be doing than setting up a low-grade sting operation.”

Boulder police spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said people need to be careful when dealing in anonymous transactions online.

A spokeswoman at Live Nation, Madonna’s concert promotion company, said it’s best to buy tickets through official channels only.

“The only way to guarantee that the ticket is valid is if they buy it directly from the ticketing agency,” she said.

As for Yanick, she’s out the $200 and still has no ticket to the show.

She said the whole experience has made her more cautious about whom she is paying online.

“As much as we want to be able to trust people, we always have to have our guard up against this kind of thing,” she said.

Source: Daily Camera.