Langley teens lose $500 in One Direction ticket scam

Emily Mierzejewski is a huge One Direction fan and is heartbroken to learn that the tickets she bought from a Craigslist ad are fakes.

A Langley teenager who spent hundreds of dollars to see boy band superstars One Direction live in Vancouver has been left heartbroken after discovering her tickets are bogus.

Emily Mierzejewski told CTV News the forgeries, which she bought on Craigslist, are so sophisticated that even a licensed broker had a hard time denying their authenticity.

Last August, when Emily learned that One Direction was coming to Vancouver on their Take Me Home tour, she said she just had to go.

“I wanted to go so bad, I even saved up my money to buy the ticket myself,” she said.

But the tickets, which ranged from about $67 to $110 on Ticketmaster, sold out almost immediately after going on sale.

Emily’s dad Tom Mierzejewski offered her a deal: if she did well in school, he’d buy her a second-hand ticket online for up to $300.

The two did their homework, staying away from ads asking for responders to wire money.

On July 3, they found an ad that looked legitimate. The seller even claimed to have receipts for the realistic-looking hard copy tickets.

So they met the seller at a nearby mall – and paid $500 for two tickets to a girl who looked to be about 16 years old.

“It all sounded really legit,” Tom said.

Emily got as far as planning her outfit for the July 27 concert at Rogers Arena before realizing she’d been duped in an elaborate scheme.

Emily found the same ad on Craigslist advertising the same seats she had paid for just a few days later.

And when she and her dad brought the tickets into a Ticketmaster agent, their suspicions were confirmed.

“He thought at first glance that they were real tickets. It took him about half an hour to determine these were in fact counterfeit tickets, but very very good ones,” Tom said.

After shelling out more than twice what the tickets are actually worth, Tom says he can’t afford to buy his daughter and her friend another ticket online.

Scalped tickets range from $700 to $1,000 – well out of their budget, they said.

“You try to teach your kids about honesty and integrity and they do the work and then they get ripped off,” Tom said emotionally.

RCMP say it’s a case of “buyer beware,” and there’s nothing they can do other than try to raise awareness.

With files from CTV British Columbia’s Jina You