SINGAPORE, June 25 — Excitement is building for Blackpink’s Deadline world tour stop in Singapore, but not all fans are celebrating.
In just two weeks, at least S$26,000 (RM86,000) has been lost to scams involving bogus resale tickets to the K-pop girl group’s upcoming shows on November 29 and 30 at the National Stadium.
According to a June 24 statement by the Singapore Police Force, there have been at least 18 reported cases where victims were tricked into paying for fake tickets advertised on platforms such as Telegram, Carousell, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook Messenger, Viagogo.com and Xiaohongshu.
Scammers often sweet-talked their victims with screenshots or videos of what appeared to be legitimate tickets or payment receipts.
They also claimed that tickets were in limited supply and had to be snapped up quickly — a tactic meant to pressure fans into making hasty payments.
Worse, when the tickets never arrived, some scammers doubled down, asking for more money on the pretext that earlier payments hadn’t gone through.
Victims only realised they had been duped when the sellers disappeared.
This isn’t the first time Blackpink’s popularity has been exploited by scammers.
During the Born Pink tour in 2023, police received at least 128 reports of similar scams, with total losses reaching over S$206,000. Many of those affected were young Singaporean females aged 10 to 29.
The police have reminded fans that tickets for the Deadline concerts are non-transferable and non-resellable. Anyone caught with a resale ticket risks being denied entry to the concert without a refund.
To combat the scams, the police are working with platforms like Carousell, Facebook Marketplace and TikTok to remove suspicious ticket listings.
They also urge the public to download the ScamShield app and to only buy tickets through Ticketmaster, the tour’s official ticketing partner.
