You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everybody, it's Marielle Kelly Richman Pope is a huge Bruno Mars fan.
She loves the song 24 karat magic, among many others.
So in 2017, when she realized he was coming to her city, she got on Ticketmaster, and the universe was smiling upon her that day because she got these amazing front row seats for pretty cheap.
And I'm thinking, oh, yeah, I got a bargain.
So my cousin and I go to the Bruno Mars concert.
We're super excited.
We get in, go through the United center door, and we get a big x over the ticket.
The ticket was fake.
And when I go back and I think, what happened?
The website that I got it off of, it did look a little bit different than the traditional looking Ticketmaster website.
And so what should have been the red flag was, how do I have these amazing seats?
It's almost like if you got Taylor Swift or Beyonce tickets front row for $100 apiece.
And that was how good of a deal this was.
She ended up tweeting at the real Ticketmaster, and they gave her and her cousin free front row tickets for all the hassle.
But the point is, Kelly got scammed.
And what's notable about that is, you know, what she does for a living.
She's a forensic accounting professor at DePaul University.
And my area of expertise is fraud, forensic accounting, and white collar crime.
Yeah.