If you can’t beat them, copy them. That seems to be the thinking behind an unusual campaign by the Dutch police, who set up a fake ticket website selling tickets that don’t exist.

The website, TicketBewust.nl, invites people to order tickets for events like football matches and concerns. But the offers were never real. The entire site was a deliberate sting, designed to show people how easily ticket fraud works.

The Netherlands’ National Police created the site to warn people about ticket fraud. They worked with the Fraud Helpdesk and online marketplace Marktplaats to run ads promoting “exclusive tickets” for sold-out concerts. If anyone got far enough to try and buy a ticket, the fake site took them to a police webpage explaining that they’d just interacted with a fake online shop.

People fell for these too-good-to-be-true deals—and that’s the most interesting part of this story. Many of us assume we’re far too savvy to fall prey to such online shenanigans, but a surprisingly large number of people do.

More than 300,000 people saw the police ads on Marktplaats between October 30, 2025, and January 11, 2026. Over 30,000 people opened opened it to take a look. 7,402 of them clicked the link to the fake site that was in the ad, and 3,432 people tried to order tickets.

That’s a reminder that online crime works a lot like regular ecommerce. Whether you’re selling real tickets or fake ones, it’s just a numbers game. Only a small percentage of people who see an ad will ever convert—but even a tiny fraction can be lucrative.

In this case, around 1% of people that saw the ad took the bait, but that represents a big profit for scammers. Fake ticket sellers raked in an average of $672 per victim in the US between 2020 and 2024, according to data from the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

Why ticket fraud is so common

Dutch police get around 50,000 online fraud complaints annually, with 10% involving fake tickets. It’s a problem in other countries too, with UK losses to gig ticket scams doubling in 2024 to £1.6 million (around $2.1 million).

Part of the reason fake ticket scams are so effective is that many cases never get reported. Some victims don’t think the loss is significant enough, while others simply don’t want to admit they were tricked. But there’s another, more fundamental reason these scams work so well: the audience is already primed to buy.

People searching for tickets are usually doing so because they don’t want to miss out. Scammers lean hard into that fear of missing out (FOMO), pairing it with scarcity cues like “sold out,” “limited availability,” or time-limited offers. People under emotional pressure from urgency and scarcity tend to do irrational things and take risks they shouldn’t. It’s why people invest erratically or take gambles on dodgy online sales.

How to protect yourself from fake ticket sites

The advice for avoiding shady ticket sellers looks a lot like advice for avoiding scams in general:

• Watch what you click on social media. Social media accounts for 52% of concert ticket fraud cases, according to the BBB data. Stick to official channels like Ticketmaster, AXS, or the venue’s box office—and double check the URL you’re accessing.
• Don’t let emotions get the better of you. Ticket sellers target high-demand events because they know people are desperate to attend and might let their guard down. That’s why fake ticket scams spiked after Oasis announced their reunion tour.
• Don’t be fooled by support lines. Just because they’re on the phone doesn’t mean they’re legit.
• Never pay via Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, gift cards or crypto. Use credit cards or other payment methods that offer purchase protection.

A little skepticism can go a long way when looking for sought-after tickets. So if you see an online ad offering you the seats of a lifetime, take a minute to research the seller. It could save you hundreds of dollars and a heap of disappointment.

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We don’t just report on scams—we help detect them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. If something looks dodgy to you, check if it’s a scam using Malwarebytes Scam Guard, a feature of our mobile protection products. Submit a screenshot, paste suspicious content, or share a text or phone number, and we’ll tell you if it’s a scam or legit. Download Malwarebytes Mobile Security for iOS or Android and try it today!

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

There’s a bizarre thing happening online right now where everything is getting worse.

Your Google results have become so bad that you’ve likely typed what you’re looking for, plus the word “Reddit,” so you can find discussion from actual humans. If you didn’t take this route, you might get served AI results from Google Gemini, which once recommended that every person should eat “at least one small rock per day.” Your Amazon results are a slog, filled with products that have surreptitiously paid reviews. Your Facebook feed could be entirely irrelevant because the company decided years ago that you didn’t want to see what your friends posted, you wanted to see what brands posted, because brands pay Facebook, and you don’t, so brands are more important than your friends.

But, according to digital rights activist and award-winning author Cory Doctorow, this wave of online deterioration isn’t an accident—it’s a business strategy, and it can be summed up in a word he coined a couple of years ago: Enshittification.

Enshittification is the process by which an online platform—like Facebook, Google, or Amazon—harms its own services and products for short-term gain while managing to avoid any meaningful consequences, like the loss of customers or the impact of meaningful government regulation. It begins with an online platform treating new users with care, offering services, products, or connectivity that they may not find elsewhere. Then, the platform invites businesses on board that want to sell things to those users. This means businesses become the priority and the everyday user experience is hindered. But then, in the final stage, the platform also makes things worse for its business customers, making things better only for itself.

This is how a company like Amazon went from helping you find nearly anything you wanted to buy online to helping businesses sell you anything you wanted to buy online to making those businesses pay increasingly high fees to even be discovered online. Everyone, from buyers to sellers, is pretty much entrenched in the platform, so Amazon gets to dictate the terms.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Doctorow about enshittification’s fast damage across the internet, how to fight back, and where it all started.

 ”Once these laws were established, the tech companies were able to take advantage of them. And today we have a bunch of companies that aren’t tech companies that are nevertheless using technology to rig the game in ways that the tech companies pioneered.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

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Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium Security for Lock and Code listeners.

Attackers are sending very convincing fake “Google” emails that slip past spam filters, route victims through several trusted Google-owned services, and ultimately lead to a look-alike Microsoft 365 sign-in page designed to harvest usernames and passwords.

Researchers found that cybercriminals used Google Cloud Application Integration’s Send Email feature to send phishing emails from a legitimate Google address: noreply-application-integration@google[.]com.

Google Cloud Application Integration allows users to automate business processes by connecting any application with point-and-click configurations. New customers currently receive free credits, which lowers the barrier to entry and may attract some cybercriminals.

The initial email arrives from what looks like a real Google address and references something routine and familiar, such as a voicemail notification, a task to complete, or permissions to access a document. The email includes a link that points to a genuine Google Cloud Storage URL, so the web address appears to belong to Google and doesn’t look like an obvious fake.

After the first click, you are redirected to another Google‑related domain (googleusercontent[.]com) showing a CAPTCHA or image check. Once you pass the “I’m not a robot check,” you land on what looks like a normal Microsoft 365 sign‑in page, but on close inspection, the web address is not an official Microsoft domain.

Any credentials provided on this site will be captured by the attackers.

The use of Google infrastructure provides the phishers with a higher level of trust from both email filters and the receiving users. This is not a vulnerability, just an abuse of cloud-based services that Google provides.

Google’s response

Google said it has taken action against the activity:

“We have blocked several phishing campaigns involving the misuse of an email notification feature within Google Cloud Application Integration. Importantly, this activity stemmed from the abuse of a workflow automation tool, not a compromise of Google’s infrastructure. While we have implemented protections to defend users against this specific attack, we encourage continued caution as malicious actors frequently attempt to spoof trusted brands. We are taking additional steps to prevent further misuse.”

We’ve seen several phishing campaigns that abuse trusted workflows from companies like Google, PayPal, DocuSign, and other cloud-based service providers to lend credibility to phishing emails and redirect targets to their credential-harvesting websites.

How to stay safe

Campaigns like these show that some responsibility for spotting phishing emails still rests with the recipient. Besides staying informed, here are some other tips you can follow to stay safe.

• Always check the actual web address of any login page; if it’s not a genuine Microsoft domain, do not enter credentials.​ Using a password manager will help because they will not auto-fill your details on fake websites.
• Be cautious of “urgent” emails about voicemails, document shares, or permissions, even if they appear to come from Google or Microsoft.​ Creating urgency is a common tactic by scammers and phishers.
• Go directly to the service whenever possible. Instead of clicking links in emails, open OneDrive, Teams, or Outlook using your normal bookmark or app.
• Use multi‑factor authentication (MFA) so that stolen passwords alone are not enough, and regularly review which apps have access to your account and remove anything you don’t recognize.

Pro tip: Malwarebytes Scam Guard can recognize emails like this as scams. You can upload suspicious text, emails, attachments and other files and ask for its opinion. It’s really very good at recognizing scams.

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We don’t just report on scams—we help detect them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. If something looks dodgy to you, check if it’s a scam using Malwarebytes Scam Guard, a feature of our mobile protection products. Submit a screenshot, paste suspicious content, or share a text or phone number, and we’ll tell you if it’s a scam or legit. Download Malwarebytes Mobile Security for iOS or Android and try it today!