We are experiencing what appears to be bot activity that involves fake accounts using stolen credit cards on our TNEW ticket purchase path. This activity has greatly increased in the past week and is a major issue.
If you use TNEW you should be reviewing orders and on the lookout for fishy behavior.
I'm posting this here to help the community with general awareness. If you discover similar behavior on your TNEW purchase path, perhaps post below or notify Tessitura so they are aware of how widespread this fraud scheme is.
How would you suggest reviewing the orders to identify fishyness? Any tips to keep a lookout for?
A big tell is the email address. Often they use an email that is not real. The way to figure that out is to put whatever is after the @ sign into a browser and see if it takes you to an actual website. We also use a couple dashboards that look for accounts that have up to our total ticket limit in one or more purchases for the run of a show. We have another dashboard that looks for any accounts with ticket purchases over our limit. Our ticket office then refunds tickets on accounts that have violated our ticket policy.
I've noticed that ours are a lot of gibberish@outlook, or gibberish@hotmail. And US states that are not normal to us. Yes, we're a tourist destination, but I've seen Utah and Wisconsin in new accounts. I also run the New Record Summary for the web user, and scan it for whacked out email addresses. I inactivate the accounts if there's no activity, and pass to box office if they do have an order. We also run the Attendance by Performance report to scan future shows and large orders that don't make sense