World Cup Ticket Scams Nab Unsuspecting Fans

A 26-year-old woman in San Diego spent $6,000 to take her beloved 89-year-old grandfather to a World Cup match – but when they got to the gate, her tickets wouldn’t load on her phone.

The well-meaning granddaughter encountered a problem faced by a growing number of sports fans, concertgoers, and other enthusiasts of big events for the public: scams and confusion that come with expensive online tickets.

The latest example comes from the World Cup, which has attracted fans – and scammers – around the world. The FBI documented dozens of fake websites designed to lure World Cup ticket purchasers to phony FIFA sites hawking expensive fraudulent tickets and hospitality packages.

According to AARP, scammers increasingly are exploiting digital tickets that are downloaded on consumer phones, sometimes months after a person pays for them. Tickets may now cost many hundreds or even thousands of dollars, enticing scammers to go after big profits. When a person purchases a ticket online, “there’s really no way to test it until you’re at the gate,” Josh Planos, a Better Business Bureau (BBB) spokesperson told AARP.

That makes it vital for consumers to be extremely cautious when buying tickets. FIFA, the organization that regulates the World Cup, is the official site to buy tickets for the event – and the safest place to buy them. The San Diego woman bought her tickets through StubHub, a ticket reseller, which eventually refunded them, but the entire transaction caused a good deal of stress and upset for her grandfather. The company enabled the two to attend a different game after her plight gained notoriety.

Although StubHub is a legitimate business, consumers may face risks when using it.

A CBC investigation in Canada found that StubHub was allowing fraudulent World Cup sellers to post “tickets” on its website for sale, months before FIFA ever released any tickets. Such tickets are known as “ghost tickets” because the seller doesn’t actually have the tickets when they post them as available. In Texas, which hosted World Cup games in Dallas and Houston, StubHub users complained that they, too, could not get access to the expensive tickets they bought. The Attorney General is investigating.

Even when consumers think they are buying tickets through the FIFA site, they can still be scammed. That’s because there are so many fraudulent sites that mimic it on the internet. The FBI advised would-be World Cup goers to type fifa.com directly in their address bar, rather than searching for it or going through a third-party ad that promises to lead you there.

One cybersecurity firm discovered that more than 13,000 FIFA-related domains were created in 2026, with one in 41 linked to malicious actors, according to an article in Wired. Beyond fake tickets, scammers were behind fraudulent immigration services for visitors who needed visas, fake merchandise, misleadig hotel sites, and more.

Individual World Cup tickets can cost more than $12,000. Scammers typically offer bargain prices, which attract fans desperate to see the games. “When they find an unusually cheap seat, they may rush to pay before checking the domain, the payment method or the seller,” AARP explained in an article about the World Cup scams. Fraudsters often want to be paid through a peer-to-peer app such as Zelle or Venmo, as opposed to a credit card. Money paid through those apps is rarely refunded when used in a scam.

Google Joins Other Corporate Giants to Tackle Cybercrime

Following a massive surge in cyberattacks, Google has teamed up with the FBI and major telecom companies to neutralize a powerful network of Chinese hackers.

“You’ve seen the texts: fake package alerts, urgent bank warnings, panicked messages about your compromised account,” Google said in a statement announcing the initiative. “Behind them is an AI-powered cybercrime network built to steal your passwords and credit cards. Today, we’re fighting back.”

Google said it was working to shut down the criminal ring, known as Outsider Enterprise, in coordination with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Google sued the criminal network in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing it of racketeering and promotion of phishing scams that use false identities to gain the trust of their victims.

The perpetrators were charged with using Google’s AI service, known as Gemini, to create an array of websites that resemble the websites of trusted organizations, such as the U.S. Postal Service. They then are said to have targeted intended victims with text messages designed to lure people onto fake sites where malicious software captured personal data.

The enormous scope of fraud helps explain why household-name corporations took the unusual step of teaming up in response. According to Google:

• Hundreds of thousands of victims have been scammed with losses estimated in the millions of dollars.
• Investigators have identified 9,000 phony websites and over 1 million fraudulent web addresses tied to the syndicate.
• In a two-week period this spring, scammers sent 2.5 million messages to Android users that included links to malicious websites.

AI-related scams, once a minor subset of online fraud, are now soaring, experts agree. “Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect,” said Brett Leatherman, Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Together with partners like Google, we can disrupt criminal networks in ways no single organization could on its own.”

California News Anchor Scammed out of $72,000

Alex Delgado, who reported on crime and other topics as a Fresno TV anchor for 22 years, recently found herself in the awkward position of being the story: She lost $72,000 in an online scam.

Such scams have become increasingly common, and even sophisticated individuals who know the risks are not immune. “If it can happen to me, and I am familiar with these – I covered it for the news, I hear about it all the time – it can happen to anyone,” Delgado said.

As she tells it, the retired newscaster was busy with travel preparations when she received a text message warning of improper activity in her financial account. Believing the scam message to be real, she called a number in the text message that offered help. A crook on the other end then advised her to protect her assets by transferring them into a different account.

Unfortunately for Delgado, the account was controlled by the swindlers, and she lost her money. “I should have been smarter than that,” she said regretfully.

Devious online communications such as the ones Delgado received are successful all too often. According to the Pew Research Center, seven in 10 adults – 73 percent – have been scammed online. In its April 2025 survey, Pew researchers found that deceptive text messages, emails, and phone calls have become a weekly occurrence for many consumers.

Fraudulent online purchase offers, accounts being hacked, and scam communications sent to smartphones and personal computers lead the list of growing problems. Among Pew’s findings:

• More than a third of those surveyed – 36 percent – experienced online transactions that went awry. These included items that turned out to be counterfeit, returns that were not refunded, and purchases that never arrived.
• Three in 10 – 29 percent – said they had personally been hacked, a problem affecting accounts for social media, email, and banking.
• More than two in 10 – 24 percent – said they had been tricked into providing personal information to scammers who had used email, text messages, or phone calls to capture their data.

In Delgado’s case, the fraudsters pretended to work for Robinhood, a legitimate broker dealer that she used for investing. As is common in such stories, the scammers applied pressure, warning her over the phone that “they are trying to hack into your account right now, so we need to move that money into a different account…”

Delgado could have saved her money (and embarrassment) if she had checked her facts with Robinhood’s actual support staff before responding to the scam text message. Unfortunately, she only reached out to Robinhood’s support staff after she had already cooperated with the scammers. But by then, “It was a little too late,” she said.