Trenton woman out hundreds of dollars after ticket scam

Online hockey ticket scam A family from Trenton says they bought fraudulent tickets to last Saturday's Ottawa Senators game. CTV's Austin Lee reports.

Anna Maria MacDonald spent months saving up before splurging on Ottawa Senators tickets for her husband, daughter, son and grandson for Christmas.

The game between the Sens and the Toronto Maple Leafs on Feb. 10 was a hot ticket, and MacDonald says she had been looking forward to it for months.

"We drove from Trenton to Ottawa. Our grandson, Luca, was turning four on Feb. 11 and this would have been his first NHL game. He was so excited," she said.

"We got to Ottawa, checked in to our hotel room, and put on our jerseys that I bought for them as gifts and then we got to the game and the barcode wouldn't scan."

MacDonald says they were sent to the ticket office where a Senators employee told them the tickets looked legitimate, but they did not in fact have seats inside the Canadian Tire Centre for the game.

"I was shaking; I was crying and just looking at my grandson's face in the corner. It just hurt," she said. "This was my first time doing something like this for my family, for the five of us to just get away."

MacDonald says she knows that missing out on a hockey game is not the end of the world and that many people have bigger issues in their lives, but she wanted to treat her family, specifically her grandson, to an escape from what has been a difficult couple of years.

She had also already covered the cost of accommodations for her family, to the tune of about $1,000.

The tickets were purchased off a third-party ticket reseller website called TicketSales.com.

That website has a Better Business Bureau (BBB) rating of 'F', after the BBB received similar complaints and reviews from customers across North America.

"When you're buying tickets, buy from the authorized agent. In our case, that's OttawaSenators.com or Ticketmaster.com," said Cyril Leeder, President and CEO of the Ottawa Senators.

"Those are authorized sites to buy initial tickets and secondary tickets. So, if you're buying from those sites, you know they are genuine tickets."

The Senators provided MacDonald with a letter from their box office that confirmed she had been defrauded in order for her to get some kind of restitution from her bank or her credit card company.

Leeder added that it is becoming increasingly rare to see these types of ticket scams, but MacDonald says she was not the only one denied entry to the CTC Saturday night because of fraudulent tickets.

"There were a lot of people near me, around the corner from us who had been scammed as well. Some of the families were from the same hotel we were staying at. There were children crying because a team from Whitby was there, and some their teammates got in but a quarter of that team did not get in," she said.

"Their tickets were also all a scam."

CTV News tried to contact TicketSales.com, but we were unable to receive information about the companies refund policy for these types of cases.