He could have been a candidate for Dad of the Year. The 30-something father of two told my friends he had brought his daughters into the city to see Taylor Swift rock Soldier Field’s 55,000-person crowd on Sunday night.
“I think they listened to that ‘Shake It Off’ song like 50 times,” the father wrote in a text to my friends. “They’re total Swifties.”
Unfortunately, one of his daughters became very ill while staying at a hotel near Merchandise Mart, and the family was forced to head back home.
The man posted his tickets on Craigslist for $122 each, hoping to make back some of the money he dropped on such expensive seats. In his ad, he made sure to note that he was a “serious seller looking for a serious buyer” and that he would meet in a public place.
But in the end, it was all complete and utter bullshit.
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It all began when two of my closest friends inquired after the tickets upon seeing the post Sunday afternoon, after monitoring StubHub and Craigslist listings for the past few weeks and hoping to buy tickets to Swift’s show once prices dipped.
The price on this specific post—$122 per ticket just hours before the show—was comparable to others up for sale. So they pooled their money and agreed to meet the seller, Clark, outside the hotel that afternoon with roughly $250 in cash.
The man strolled out of the hotel in khaki shorts and a nice shirt.
“Just a completely ordinary-looking guy,” my friend said.
Small talk was made. The tickets were inspected. A proof of purchase from Ticketmaster was displayed. Money was exchanged. And, finally, the tickets were handed over. Nothing crazy.
The tickets read “$352.00” under “Admission.”
As my friends approached the gate at Soldier Field on Sunday evening, they said, they had already become nervous and “90 percent sure at this point that they wouldn’t work.”
The tickets were handed to the attendant to be scanned and “ennghhh.”
“They didn’t scan,” my friend explained. “They asked another attendant to come over and try. Failed again. After inspecting them for a minute they simply said, ‘Yeah, these are fake. Where did you get them?’ “
Once the attendants heard they were from Craigslist, they immediately assumed someone had scammed my friends, pointing out flaws in the fake tickets’ bar codes, mainly a large black line running the length of the bottom part of the code.
So there my friends stood, two defeated Millennials outside Soldier Field—$250 poorer and their dignity ripped entirely from them.
“I think it hurt less because we were skeptical beforehand,” he said. “Someone finding out 10 minutes before they were going to see Taylor Swift that their tickets weren’t real? That would be far more heartbreaking.”
To soothe their pain, they made a pact to speed past the oncoming “teenyboppers,” buy a bottle of Jeppson’s Malort and 40 chicken nuggets from McDonald’s and binge-watch every video on Swift’s VEVO channel on YouTube.
My male friend said he’ll never buy tickets to a big concert off Craigslist again. My female friend, however?
“I feel even closer to Taylor because she’s been naive and had her heart broken and now I have too,” she said the day after the emotionally draining experience.
Sean Ely is RedEye’s video editor.