They splurged for Coachella tickets; They got scammed instead

Matt Rossi spent about $1,700 on StubHub for access to the first weekend of Coachella, which wrapped up Sunday, traveling from Manhattan to the California desert for the popular annual music festival. He received a wristband (the festival’s form of ticket) in the mail with a handwritten note from his seller, supposedly named Tyler, before registering the band under his own name through the Coachella app.

Rossi had been excited to attend, and he had loaded up on phone chargers, sunscreen and curated outfits in anticipation of the trip. But the reality on the ground in Indio was not what he expected. Instead, the 30-year-old likened his experience at the festival to the reality show "Survivor.”

"Your phone’s dying. There’s no phone service,” Rossi, a fitness influencer, said. "You’re navigating huge crowds of ... thousands of people. You’re kind of concerned about crowd crush at times.”

All of this happened before Rossi had his wristband confiscated by a Coachella customer service employee. Rossi learned Saturday morning that his wristband had been reported lost or stolen by the individual who initially bought the ticket. Since he got the ticket via StubHub, a third-party ticket resale site, he was told there was nothing Coachella could do. The person who sold it to Rossi had likely already received a replacement.After he got a wristband from a friend who was leaving the festival early, StubHub refunded Rossi and offered him some site credits. But, by then, he had soured on the festival entirely.

"I think if there was some sort of make-good situation happening, then I would [go back],” Rossi said. "But otherwise, I don’t know that I’ll be returning soon.”

A spokesperson for Goldenvoice, the company that organizes Coachella, didn’t respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment.

With a festival like Coachella, where roughly125,000 people attend each day while hundreds more attempt to find a way in, it’s a given that some attendees will deal with ticket scams. But some who were swindled out of their wristbands told The Post that ticket scams seemed widespread this year - a characterization some ticket resellers disputed. Some of the ripped-off attendees were given new tickets or refunds from ticket resale sites StubHub or Vivid Seats, while others who found tickets through social media or the marketplace service OfferUp had to shell out for another wristband - or eat their losses and head home.

Once described as the "anti-Woodstock” because of the inaugural Coachella’s emphasis on organization and quality acts - this year’s headliners over two weekends include Justin Bieber, Karol G and Sabrina Carpenter - the music festival has developed into a pop culture phenomenon and social-media status symbol. More recently, it’s been dubbed "the influencer Super Bowl,” a playground for short-form content and branded sponsorships. Attendance has steadily grown since its 1999 debut and tickets for one weekend now cost at least $549. Last weekend, celebs from Timothée Chalamet to Katy Perry - with former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau in tow - milled about the festival grounds.

While those VIPs got to see Bieber, some Coachella regulars were stuck on the other side of the fence, searching for backup tickets. After having her wristband reported lost or stolen, Lauren Esparza, 29, wasn’t able to find a replacement. Some of her friends reached out and said they too had purchased tickets from third-party sites only to be told the same thing. Reddit, meanwhile, is awash with forums complaining of shady cash payments, missing packages and other potential scams.

"This is the first year where I’ve heard about so many people getting scammed,” said Esparza, who had been to Coachella six times before and had used the OfferUp app before without any problems. Her weekend tickets cost $600 each. In an email, Kelly Stephenson, OfferUp’s vice president of marketing and communications, told The Post: "During the festival period, we’ve been in regular contact with the Coachella team and have taken action on listings that violate our policies.”

Coachella offers a resale platform through the ticket service AXS and discourages buying tickets from any other platform. "The festival won’t service, authenticate, or support passes purchased from any unauthorized third parties and are unable to assist in any such transactions,” the festival’s website reads.

Third-party ticket sellers were quick to dispel the idea that ticket issues were common for Coachella’s first weekend. (The festival’s second weekend kicks off on Friday.) Jill Gonzalez, a spokesperson for StubHub, said in an email that instances where sold wristbands were then reported missing were rare. "Although it might not seem like it,” Gonzalez wrote, "nearly 100% of our Coachella Weekend 1 orders went through without a hitch.”

While concertgoers like Esparza and Rossi had their wristbands in advance only to find out they had been marked stolen, some Coachella-bound concertgoers never got their bracelets. After using resale platform Vivid Seats to buy three wristbands for $1,820, Elexis Willingham received a package that was supposed to contain her tickets, only to find several blank sheets of printer paper.

"The way that Vivid Seats works is, if something like this happens, they told me they basically charged [the seller] 300 percent per ticket that they sold,” Willingham, 31, said, adding that Vivid Seats quickly found new tickets for her at no extra cost. "They’re gonna get their karma anyways.” A spokesperson for Vivid Seats confirmed in an email that Willingham’s seller was penalized and banned from the platform.

Others weren’t so lucky. Joe Ceraulo posted on Threads that he was looking for a last-minute way to get into the festival, before jumping on a phone call with someone with the Threads username therealdjroww. Ceraulo paid him $300 via Apple Cash for a so-called "artist pass,” which would have included lodging and parking.

"His T’s were crossed and his I’s were dotted, to his credit,” Ceraulo, 27, of West Los Angeles, said, before admitting that the offer was too good to be true. "He had a lot of details: You’re going to get an email and you’re going to present this to the people at the gate and they’re going to let you in for parking and they’ll show you where to park and where you’re staying.”

When reached by phone, therealdjroww responded to The Post’s questions by uttering an expletive before hanging up. Several other accounts on Threads recalled similar interactions with therealdjroww. On Monday, the user claimed to have passes for the second weekend.

Even though Coachella doesn’t take responsibility for tickets sold through third parties, Esparza thinks they should implement an ID requirement so that attendees can prove that either they bought the ticket or the person they purchased it from has transferred it to them. She filed a report with her local police department but, otherwise, didn’t feel like there was much she could do.

Despite being a Coachella regular, Esparza, a fitness instructor from Newport Beach, California, was particularly looking forward to this festival because of Bieber’s headlining sets. Instead of seeing the pop heartthrob up-close, she was stuck watching Bieber cycle through his hits from the online Coachella live stream while sitting at her parent’s house nearby, cautiously looking for a cheap, resale ticket online.

"I watched him for a little bit and it was a bittersweet moment,” Esparza said. "But then back to the search. I feel like my eyes are swollen from being on my phone for so long looking.”