A-mei Ticket Dystopia

Many fans were unable to purchase tickets and desperately searched for ways to get their hands on some.

The CIB claims that some became victims of fraudsters who promised tickets but didn’t deliver after taking the fans’ money. One Taipei woman said she had wired NT$23,200 ($740) to two contacts she had found on an online shopping site. Another woman said she had been fooled into sending NT$12,000 to someone.

The CIB has set up a special hotline to address ticket fraud issues and is urging music fans to only buy tickets from official agencies. In related news, tickets for an additional nine concerts for the farewell tour of Taiwanese pop diva 

Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau is warning the public of widespread cheating in the sale of tickets to popular concerts. All of the tickets for pop diva A-Mei’s 10 concerts at Taipei Arena went on sale Jan. 25 after the initial series of 16 concerts sold out immediately.

In order to handle the sale as fairly as possible, one ticket site, Acer Cloud, was tasked with the job of selling the tickets, and they required people to register as members beforehand.

Before the sale date, more than 300,000 people had registered, though only 90,000 tickets were available. However, on Jan. 27 alone, Acer reported that the cloud computing unit handling the requests “absorbed nearly 40 million hack attacks during the registration and sales process.”

Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice, which is investigating the attacks, would not divulge the source but did say that some came from overseas. In any event, all were blocked by Acer’s system.