How to tell if a ticket seller is legit

You found tickets. The seller seems nice. The price is fair. Now you have to send money to a stranger and hope.

There is a faster way to know than hoping. This page shows you the one question that separates real sellers from scam accounts, and a free two minute check that answers it.

The only question that matters

Every ticket scam runs the same way. Take the money, delete the account, start again under a new name. The scammer never had to be clever. They just had to be untraceable.

So the question is not "does this seller seem trustworthy". Scammers are good at seeming trustworthy. The question is: if this person takes my money and disappears, do I know who they are?

If the answer is no, you are not buying tickets. You are making a donation and hoping for tickets.

Why the usual checks don't work anymore

Buyers used to protect themselves by asking for proof. That stopped working.

Screenshots of tickets get copied from real listings and reused. Screen recordings and PDF confirmations get edited. Scammers phish real fan accounts and post from them, so the seller can have years of history and real friends and still be a stranger who took over the account last week. (The pattern is described in detail in TrustMatch's write-up on social media ticket scams.)

Account age, follower count, a profile picture, "proof" in the DMs: none of these tell you who you are paying. They tell you what the scammer wants you to see.

The 2 minute check: ask for their Anchor

Anchor is a free link that proves a real, named person is behind an account.

To get one, a seller verifies their identity once with a government ID and a live selfie check (not a photo, a live check that a real person is in front of the camera). Their real name is then shown on their Anchor page, along with which social accounts are really theirs. The ID itself stays private. Nobody sees the document, only that the check passed.

So when a seller sends you their Anchor link, you see three things:

1. A real name, from a government ID.
2. That a live real-person check passed.
3. That the account you are talking to is one of theirs.

That changes the scammer's math. A throwaway account can vanish. A verified name cannot.

How to ask: "Before I send anything, can you send me your Anchor? It's free at getanchor.id and takes about two minutes." If you want it to feel less awkward, get your own first and send it before you ask for theirs. It lands the way swapping Instagrams does.

What to do with the link: open it yourself on getanchor.id. Do not accept a screenshot of an Anchor page; screenshots can be edited, live pages cannot. Check that the account you are dealing with is on their list of accounts. If it is not, or the name does not match who the account claims to be, stop.

What it means if they refuse

A real seller can do this in about two minutes for free. Refusing is not proof they are a scammer, but it means you would be sending money to someone who will not put their name on the deal. Every scam account in existence would refuse. Very few real fans would.

Our rule: no Anchor, no money.

Other things worth doing

These do not replace knowing who you are paying, but they help.

Pay through the official ticketing app's transfer feature where the event allows it, so the tickets move in a way the venue recognises. Be careful with payment methods that have no buyer protection; scammers push Zelle, Cash App and Venmo Friends and Family for exactly that reason. And if a seller adds a "transfer fee" or "verification deposit" after you have paid, that is the scam. Stop paying.

What Anchor does not do

It does not check the tickets. It checks the person. It does not help with fake ticket websites, which BBB's 2025 data (as charted by Surfshark) puts at 38% of reported ticket scams, the biggest single slice. Anchor's territory is the other half: deals between two people in a group, a thread or a DM. And it does not guarantee anything. It changes who has something to lose.

Get your own Anchor

Sending yours first is the easiest way to ask for theirs. It is free, takes about two minutes, and works for anything you buy or sell from a stranger, not just tickets.