You're listening to Life Kit, from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mary L.

Kelly Richmond Pope is a huge Bruno Mars fan.

She loves the song 24 carrotCarrat 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 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 ticket master 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 Beyoncé tickets front row for a hundred bucks a piece and that was

how good of a deal this was. She ended up tweeting at the

real ticket master 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, in other words, scams. Her expertise is scams. So scams even happen to people

who study them.

Scammers are everywhere, especially online. In 2022, there was an estimated $8.8 billion lost to fraud.

These scammers want your money, but also your personal information.

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