Fraudulent ticket sales over the past few months have left Georgetown students scammed out of thousands of dollars and even their identities by users of the campus-wide messaging app GroupMe.
According to students interviewed by the Voice, many scams occurred in the Ticket Exchange group chat. This group chat was the hub of a frenzy of panicked students trying to buy tickets to last-minute events or sell passes to music festivals they booked two months before they found out there was a midterm. . Although this channel is primarily used by Georgetown students, the group is public, so anyone with a GroupMe account can join.
Typically, sellers announce their tickets in a group chat when they list them, and other potential buyers contact them directly. At this point, either the buyer or seller will request the other party to send proof of identity (usually a screenshot of their GOCard). Scammers are exploiting this tactic to impersonate Georgetown students on GroupMe.
A university spokesperson said the fraudsters were using “fraudulent GOCards” in these transactions. The Georgetown University Police Department (GUPD) is also seeing an increase in complaints about GroupMe scams. The Voice spoke to a total of eight students who had their money scammed or their identities stolen.
GUPD’s crime log lists one case of online ticket fraud in 2023 and three cases throughout 2024, with the most recent case reported on September 14th. However, not all students who fell victim to the GroupMe scam reported the incident to GUPD. voice.
Rory Dixon (SFS ’25) was looking for a day ticket to a local music festival, All Things Go, when she encountered a scammer. On Aug. 26, Dixon sent a message to a user named Amron, telling him he had tickets. The seller responded the next day and was incredibly persistent.
“They responded to about four messages in a row in an hour,” Dixon said.
Camron asked Dixon the price of two tickets, and Dixon happily accepted what he thought was an unusually low offer.
“I said $160, but I thought I’d try to negotiate it lower,” Dixon said. One of his other friends had bought two tickets for $150 each.
The seller quickly accepted the offer and asked Dixon for his email address. Mr. Dixon wanted to be sure he was talking to a real student, so he asked Mr. Kamron to send him his NetID, but Mr. Camron immediately refused. Dixon shared a screenshot of the conversation with the Voice.
“I can send you my go card so you know I’m not a scam lol,” Kamron wrote.
The seller sent a photo of a GOCard belonging to Georgetown student Cam Noraste, but Dixon found it odd that the user was reluctant to provide his NetID.
He also noted that the seller had been calling himself “Amron” before sending the GOCard, but had changed the name to “Kamron” to match the name on the card.
Dixon offered to buy tickets directly with cash. Mr. Kamron then offered to use Apple Pay for the transaction and instructed Mr. Dixon to transfer $100 and pay the remaining $60 once he received the ticket. Dixon was hesitant about sending such a large amount of money to someone he had never met.
“If you don’t want to see me on campus, I’m leaving,” Dixon wrote.
At this point, the seller became dissatisfied. The seller lowered his initial request and offered to have Dixon send him only $60 instead of $100 before accepting the ticket, but became upset that Dixon was wary of being scammed.
“If you don’t believe I’m cool, you can hear it from someone else!” the seller wrote.
Dixon walked away from the exchange without sending money. He didn’t buy a ticket because he realized he was likely dealing with a scammer since Camron’s name had changed and he wouldn’t meet in person.
At the time of Dixon’s interview with the Voice, the account name had changed again to “Catherine Eileen.” Although the user behind the account name is a scammer, Katherine Eileen Rose (CAS ’25) is a genuine Georgetown student who has been dealing with the fallout from the GroupMe scam for months.
Rose started searching ticket exchanges last April, trying to get last-minute tickets to the Dip Ball. Many of her friends were in fourth grade at the time, and she wanted to make memories with them at a celebration before graduation. It was the day of the event, and there were only a few tickets left, so students flooded the GroupMe chat with requests to exchange and sell/barter tickets, and scammers tried to take advantage of that.
“There was so much fraud going on,” Rose said. “I was like, ‘Oh, send me this Venmo or Apple Pay or something.’ So of course I was like, ‘Okay, so can I confirm that you’re who you say you are? ‘It was like that.
Both sellers and buyers on ticket exchanges were demanding increasingly sophisticated identification to detect potential fraudsters. To get her ticket, Rose had to send a video of her identity to the seller.
Rose said she is usually confident in identifying scams and suspicious people. In about eight other conversations Mr. Rose had with GroupMe users who seemed suspicious due to their strangely formal language or excessive typos, he quickly labeled them as possibly not students. was rejected.
But when some of the sellers sent in real GOCards for identification, Rose didn’t anticipate that it might be someone stealing the identities of Georgetown students. did.
“They went to great lengths to basically use someone’s GOCard, and I thought it was very obvious, ‘Oh, it has to be that person,'” Rose said. said.
Rose was sent a GOCard by someone pretending to be another student, Olga Rivas. Rose sent her a GOCard in exchange for proof of who she was before ultimately giving up on the purchase. Rose did not transfer the money to the user, considering the seller a potential scammer, but did not come out of the situation completely unscathed.
“They didn’t take my money, but they took my name,” Rose said.
The scammer stole Rose’s GOCard and used it to impersonate her and commit fraud over the next few months. She still receives messages on GroupMe and Instagram from people who aren’t sure if they’re talking to the real Rose.
“Since then, this whole mess has followed me like a black cloud,” she said.
Rose has a list of six different accounts using her name since she was identified in April, and more than 20 people have contacted her saying they were talking to someone pretending to be her on GroupMe. He said he had taken it.
Among those who were defrauded by accounts impersonating Rose were Michael Sowa (CAS ’28) and his friend Ryan Aminloo (SFS ’28). They were scammed out of $150 while trying to buy tickets to a Fisher concert on October 4th. After they sent the money to the Venmo seller, the account stopped responding to messages, Sowa said.
Aminloo then had to call his bank to cancel the transaction.
“They had to freeze his bank account so he couldn’t use his card,” Sowa said. “I think he’s still frozen, but it’s been about two weeks. So he’s having a bit of a hard time right now.”
Sowa and Aminloo do not know that Rose is a real student and have not contacted her about the scam.
At first, Rose didn’t know how to resolve the situation, but when she learned that someone had been the victim of ticket fraud using an account using her name, she knew she had to do something.
“The last straw for me was when someone showed me how they had scammed me out of hundreds of dollars,” Rose said. “It was very sad. When I read the messages, I could see that the person who was scammed was very vulnerable to the situation.”
To resolve these issues, Rose contacted GroupMe user support directly, and GroupMe removed the accounts of the people Rose flagged as scammers. A week before Rose spoke to the Voice, GroupMe had shut down five different accounts.
While GroupMe support was quick to respond to her complaints, Rhodes said administrators at the ticket exchange site GroupMe were less cooperative and even removed people who tried to call scammers. pointed out. However, Voice could not confirm whether this was due to confusion or who was the impostor in this case. Sowa and Aminlou were also removed from the group chat after they sent a message saying that the fake “Catherine Irene” was a scammer.
“They’re just banning people who say anything about fraud,” Rose said. “Why are administrators essentially banning whistleblowers, or whistleblowers?”
Rose found herself banned from Ticket Exchange due to some fraudulent activity using her name. The Voice found 11 other cases since September 27th where users who mentioned fraud were removed from Ticket Exchange GroupMe. GroupMe administrators did not respond to requests for comment.
Sammi Deutsch (SFS ’25) learned about the scam when she searched for Gracie Abrams tickets on Ticket Exchange GroupMe, but she never thought she would be one of the victims. She has been on GroupMe for years and used to sell and buy tickets.
“This never happened before. During my freshman and sophomore years, there were no scammers on GroupMe for the most part, so people actually used it all the time,” Deutsch said. Ta. “I was abroad last semester, but I hadn’t used it for about a year. I didn’t realize it had deteriorated so much.”
At first, Deutsch wasn’t surprised when he sent a message offering tickets for sale for $100 each, a relatively low price compared to other options. She asked for the seller’s GOCard and NetID and discovered they were Eli Blumenfeld, another senior she knew on campus.
Mr. Deutsch was wary of scammers, so he suggested sending half the money first, then receiving the ticket and then sending the other half.
“They reacted like normal people, as if to say, ‘Yes, of course, no worries,'” Deutsch said.
However, after sending the first half of the money using Apple Pay, I noticed that the merchant quickly became unresponsive. The seller first claimed that his phone was broken, then claimed that he had not received the money and repeatedly pressed Deutsch to send the money again.
Deutsch, who had never used Apple Pay before this encounter, became suspicious, but sent the other half to the seller anyway.
“I was so excited because I never thought anyone would resell Gracie Abrams tickets,” Deutsch said. “I was desperate to get a ticket. And since I was in class, I wasn’t paying as much attention to the conversation we were having.”
When the seller again refused to buy tickets, Deutsch realized he had been scammed.
“I started accusing whoever it was of being a scammer,” Deutsch said. “They were like, ‘No, no.’ If you want to exchange tickets, meet me in person on campus and we can handle it there.” And I was perfect. But obviously they didn’t follow it up. ”
Deutsch called Apple and filed a dispute with his bank, but ultimately lost the money.
Students interviewed by Voice advised students looking to purchase tickets to contact non-GroupMe sellers either in person or by verifying their identity via email or other social media platform. I suggested it. Other advice includes using a trackable platform to send money, like Venmo, and flagging and reporting fraudulent accounts as scams.
More than anything, Rose said he hopes people who fall victim to GroupMe scams don’t blame themselves for what happened.
“If you haven’t experienced it, you won’t understand what it’s like to be a victim of a situation like that. That’s why so many people are embarrassed about being scammed. I feel like there was so much stigma against coming forward,” Rose said. “But I know from personal experience that I consider myself very conscious and have a lot of common sense, so I was able to find almost all of them, but I can’t find them.” 1% did not.”
