Eras Tour, Ticketek: Urgent warning to Australian Taylor Swift fans trying to buy tickets at work

Taylor Swift fans in Australia trying to buy tickets to her Eras Tour concert dates could be sabotaging their chances by using the Ticketek app or website at work.

Ticketing platforms like Ticketek generally consider a single IP address as a single user when processing ticket sales.

Ticketek is known to employ security measures, like tracking IP addresses, to ensure fair distribution and prevent scalping or bots from buying large quantities of tickets. 

But this can mean that multiple different users on the same network – such as employees in a shared office – may be blocked from buying tickets.

Ticketek treats all users coming from that IP as a single user, meaning your chances of getting through the queue will be worse if you are on your work Wi-Fi.

The best way to get around this problem is to get off your employer’s network and access the internet via your mobile data.

IP addresses can also be masked or changed using various techniques, but this is a more complicated process.

More to come.

It comes as fans of the American pop artist – known as Swifties – have reported a confusing message from Ticketek that has created chaos as millions try to secure seats at her Eras Tour.

More than one million fans are fighting it out for 450,000 tickets during the Frontier Touring presale event that kicked off at 10am on Wednesday.

A post shared to Ticketek’s Facebook page earlier this week suggested that fans login to their account before the sale goes live.

However, as fans started to queue up in the waiting lounge in the final hour before the sale, they grew concerned when they couldn’t find any tickets.

‘I thought the tips given by Frontier Touring was to log into Ticketek account prior to accessing the link???’ one fan tweeted.

‘This is way too confusing.’

Another fan responded to a Ticketek tweet asking if they are still meant to login before the presale starts.

‘There is no login page now it directly goes to the queue,’ they said.

Swifties from every Australian state, plus thousands more from New Zealand and neighbouring Pacific nations, have tested the limits of the Ticketek website capacity as traffic piles up with the virtual queues.

There are just five shows – two at Melbourne’s MCG and three at Sydney’s Accor Stadium – going on sale on Wednesday, with the final tickets up for grabs on Friday.

The American Express site crashed 30 minutes before the first presale was set to begin and the site remained down for an hour.

Some desperate fans have paid AirTaskers up to $1,000 to improve their chances, with ads popping up on the service looking for ‘help securing Taylor Swift tickets’.

One fan posted an offer of $100 for ‘a computer whiz’ who can secure tickets ‘during high internet traffic’.