A huge fan of WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark was desperate to get her hands on tickets to see the professional basketball player play the Chicago Sky in June, but when she tried to redeem her tickets, something went wrong.

When she realized she had lost more than $1,000, she contacted NBC 5 for help.

“When Caitlin Clark signed up for the WNBA, I pulled out onto the street and opened one of the apps to immediately buy tickets to the Sky,” said the superfan, who we’ll call Jackie to protect her privacy.

She said she immediately went to third-party ticket sales site Tick Pick and bought four tickets to watch the Fever vs. Sky game, forking out a total of $600.

The tickets were transferred from Tick Pick to her Ticketmaster account, which is standard practice, and everything seemed fine until she got to the game.

“I scanned all four tickets and they showed up as non-functional,” Jackie said.

Stunned, she went to the Ticketmaster counter to get help.

“(The ticket seller) said, ‘Oh, it looks like you transferred all your tickets last week.’ And I said, ‘To who? Because I wasn’t in my account.’ And he said, ‘Well, there’s no way to recover that because you’ve already transferred it to other people.'”

But Jackie said she didn’t give her tickets to anyone and believes her Ticketmaster account was hacked. She didn’t want to leave the game without seeing Clark play, though, so she asked Ticketmaster about her options.

“Ticketmaster said, ‘We have some tickets left you should buy them.’ So we bought them,” Jackie said.

Their new seats for the Fever-Sky game were far worse and, at $1,300, much more expensive.

After the game, Jackie said she called Tick Pick and Ticketmaster several times and was eventually promised a refund by Ticketmaster.

But Jackie said Ticketmaster mistakenly sent her a $129 refund for a comedy show instead of the lost Fever tickets. That’s when she reached out to NBC 5 Responds for help.

We have contacted both companies about their situation.

Tick ​​Pick told NBC 5 Responds that they had no control over the “cybersecurity practices of the primary ticketing platform” and that Jackie had to seek help from Ticketmaster.

A Ticketmaster representative told us that Jackie’s Ticketmaster account was likely compromised in an isolated incident by a malicious actor.

The company said it was refunding Jackie the $1,350 she paid for replacement tickets to the game as a “one-time goodwill gesture,” and replacing her Green Bay Packers season tickets because it could not say whether those tickets were also compromised in the hack.

Jackie isn’t so sure if this is an “isolated case.” Last month, news of two data breaches at the company made headlines.

In May, Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation confirmed that hackers had stolen the names and credit card details of more than 500 million Ticketmaster customers. Two weeks later, another breach was announced, but the company has not disclosed how many customers were affected by that incident. Ticketmaster has since offered affected customers 12 months of free identity monitoring.

“I had no idea what happened,” Jackie said. “And they didn’t contact anyone about the password change, otherwise I would have done that immediately.”

Jackie has now secured her account and is glad she was able to rely on NBC 5 Responds’ help to get her money back, totaling $1,352.

Ticketmaster also told us that if you purchased your tickets through a third-party website like Tick Pick, you should contact the third-party seller for a refund.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Prevent ticket theft by regularly changing your password for all your ticket websites or accounts.
• Set up two-factor authentication on your accounts. If someone figures out your password, they won’t be able to log into your account unless they have access to your phone.