A woman, known among netizens as the “e-ticket queen”, has been arrested and charged with online fraud, after she allegedly sold fake e-tickets to major concerts in Thailand, including Blackpink’s ‘Born Pink World Tour Bangkok’.
Cybercrime police apprehended Nattarika Yangsuai at a Bangkok dormitory, after a court issued the warrant based on complaints received by the police from many victims, who claimed they paid for e-tickets for the concerts, but when they arrived at the venue they found the seats were already occupied. The overall damage caused by the scam is estimated to be about Bt700,000.
The suspect is also the subject of another nine arrest warrants, police said, all related to the sale of fake concert e-tickets.
Nattarika confessed that members of the Blackpink girl group’s fan club hired her team to grab online tickets for Blackpink’s ‘Born Pink World Tour Bangkok’ on their behalf.
She managed to book about 200 of the Bt9,600 tickets, which are the most expensive. She resold them for Bt15,000-Bt30,000 each, profiting by hundreds of thousands of baht. She however resold the already-sold e-tickets to Blackpink fans, who learnt about the fraud only when they arrived at the concert.
As her name was on the tickets, the victims alerted the police. Nattarika claimed that she has already refunded some victims, but does not have enough money to refund all of them, but police say that she admitted to the wrongdoing and will try to refund as much money as possible.
Pol Maj Gen Teeradej Thammasutee, a metropolitan police commander, said that a background check on the suspect revealed that she is addicted to online gambling and needed more and more money to feed the habit.
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