When lifelong Liverpool fan Matty Orme opened the email attachment that was supposed to be the Champions League final tickets he had paid £1,500 for, he knew he had been scammed.
He had missed out on tickets on the club’s official ballot and had turned to a social media page that said they were selling tickets for the 2022 final in Paris.
He says he had used the site before and “didn’t think twice” about paying “a lot of money” for something that was “special” to him as a football fan.
That was until he looked at what arrived in his inbox.
“I opened the PDF in Photoshop and saw that the layers had been edited and I knew immediately it was fake,” he told the BBC as part of his Scam Safe week.
“I sent a message to the Twitter account but they never got back in touch. In fact, their account was deleted and their mobile number was also cut off.
“It was a hard pill to swallow.”
According to data released by Santander on Thursday, its clients reported losses of almost a quarter of a million pounds (£243,000) due to sports ticket scams by its customers between January and September this year.
The bank said football-related scams accounted for the largest share, accounting for more than half (52%) of all losses.
While football-related scams were the most common, other sports had higher losses per victim. Motorsport ticket scams had the highest average loss at £3,851, with total losses reaching £50,070. Golf was next, with fans losing an average of £860 and a total of £51,685.
The average loss from sports ticket scams has risen to £352 this year from £225 in 2023, according to the bank, with 693 claims made in the period.
Orme posted about her experiences on social media “as a warning” to others and received messages from others with similar experiences.
“It was one of those guys who set up a WhatsApp group to get us all together and that’s when we realized the scale: there were 50 to 60 other people like us and all together we think we’ve lost over £100,000.”
Orme, whose team lost to Real Madrid in the final, eventually got his money back through his bank.
“I was lucky because I was able to prove that I had purchased through the same Twitter page before and that the first time it was a legitimate sale,” he said. “This shows that I didn’t just send money to someone without checking, when I was actually scammed, so I won my case through the ombudsman. However, many people still haven’t gotten their money back.”
Detective Sergeant Danny Galvin of Merseyside Police told the BBC’s Morning Live program last month that police see spikes in “this type of ticket scamming behaviour” when there are high-profile matches with ticket shortages.
“Unfortunately, when you choose not to purchase from a legitimate seller, you lose all protection and become vulnerable to scammers,” he added.
A Lloyds Bank study carried out earlier this year showed that criminals were most likely to target fans of top teams, with Arsenal and Liverpool supporters being the most common victims.
And according to the NatWest Ticket Scam League, which is a table based on the volumes and value of cases reported to the bank, Liverpool fans were scammed the most., external lose more than £17,000 to criminals in the 2023-24 season.
The Lloyds Bank study estimated that around 6,000 UK football fans were victims of fraud in the 2023-24 season for non-existent Premier League tickets, an increase of around a third compared to the previous season. .