SAM Magazine—Red Lodge, Mont., March 7, 2024—There appears to be an extensive effort to sell fraudulently purchased lift tickets on Craigslist at a discounted price, with dozens of ski areas across North America being targeted. 

Officials at Red Lodge Mountain, Mont., recently caught on to the scam, and confronted guests who had purchased tickets from a Craigslist user for 50 percent off. Like many people who are lured by the prospect of a good deal on lift tickets, the guests were unaware that it was a scam. Red Lodge got law enforcement involved to help investigate.

The details closely match accounts shared in a recent SAM article (“Finding Fraud,” November 2023) about credit card fraud. A Craigslist user—or several Craigslist users—buys lift tickets online using stolen credit card numbers and poses as a third-party ticket seller on Craigslist, sells the tickets at a discount, and then shares the QR codes with the buyers to redeem the lift tickets at a kiosk or lift ticket window. In Red Lodge’s case, the buyers used Venmo to pay the Craigslist user.

The user creates a unique customer profile in the e-commerce system for every purchase, so it’s difficult to track. 

A quick search on Craigslist reveals a handful of these bad actors, some offering half-off lift tickets for ski areas from Maine to California.

In the SAM article, ski area operators shared a few “tells” that can help identify fraudsters, such as entering the same (stolen) credit card number for multiple, unrelated purchases; using identical mailing addresses; typing in guest names using all lower-case letters; and entering a full first name but only an initial for the last name.

Also, unusual email addresses and personal information from people located very far from the resort (a more difficult tell for destination resorts, of course) can be indicators of fraud. 

Once fraudulent purchases are identified, ski area staff confront the guests when they try to redeem their tickets, and most often get law enforcement involved. In the case of Mountain Creek, N.J., that included the FBI.

To help protect themselves from credit card fraud, operators are advised to increase their understanding about how such scams work, monitor online activity that may indicate that they are a target, review transactions to spot potential fraud, and use that information to inform future fraud-prevention efforts.

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