Is your friend selling Taylor Swift tickets? Make sure it's not a hacker

As Taylor Swift is set to embark on the Canadian leg of her Eras world tour, scammers are taking advantage of the insatiable demand for tickets to the sold-out shows.

"It's just hard to point out who is real," said Summer Nickel. 

Nickel, 20, is a long-time fan from Maple Ridge, B.C., and she's been trying to buy resale tickets to one of the three Vancouver shows since they sold out almost instantly last summer. Of the roughly 15 times she's tried to buy them, every attempt has resulted in failure. 

Fraudsters are capitalizing on the lengths diehard Swifties will go to snag a seat to one of her Canadian shows, often bilking them out of thousands of dollars and leaving them heartbroken and disappointed. 

"They're very needy," said Nickel. "They want you to send the money now." 

Nickel says her mother, who has also been trying to buy her tickets, almost fell victim, thinking a Facebook friend had posted tickets for sale on their page. Turns out, the account was hacked. 

Not only that, Nickel showed CBC News screen shots of a fake account under her own name created to scam other people. 

"Clearly that's not me because I'm searching for tickets," she said. "It's just really crazy what it's come to." 

Ritesh Kotak, a cybersecurity and technology analyst in Toronto, says people tend to fall for scams when the seller is purportedly a friend because there's a level of trust there. 

"It adds an element of legitimacy," he said. 

"These tickets are a hot commodity. There's clearly individuals willing to pay top dollar for it and hackers and fraudsters are going to do everything in their power to exploit it."

Some people whose accounts were hacked told CBC News they tried to report the fraud to Facebook, and got friends and family to do the same, but in many cases, they say the social media company did not take the posts or accounts down. 

"I felt helpless and just so bad that my name was being used to scam others," said Sonia Sidhu, a Toronto woman whose Facebook account was hacked last July.

After Swift's concert tickets sold out, the hacker immediately started posting in Sidhu's professional and community groups that she had tickets for sale.