Through fraudulent ticket sales over the past several months, Georgetown students have been scammed out of thousands of dollars—and even their identities—by users on GroupMe, a messaging app used across campus.
According to students interviewed by the Voice, many scams took place in the Ticket Exchange group chat—a frenzied hub of panicked students trying to buy last-minute event tickets or sell off music festival passes they booked two months before finding out they had a midterm. While the channel is mainly used by Georgetown students, anyone with a GroupMe account can join since the group is public.
Typically, sellers will announce in the group chat when they’re listing a ticket, and another member looking to make the purchase will reach out to them directly. At this point, either the buyer or the seller will request that the other person send proof of identity–typically a screenshot of their GOCard, and scammers have been exploiting this tactic to impersonate Georgetown students on GroupMe.
According to a university spokesperson, scammers have been using “fraudulent GOCards” in these transactions. Georgetown University Police Department (GUPD) has also received increased complaints about GroupMe scams. The Voice spoke with a total of eight students who either were scammed out of either money or had their identities stolen.
GUPD crime logs list one instance of fraud in online ticket scams in 2023 and three throughout 2024, with the most recently reported instance on Sept. 14. However, not all students who experience GroupMe scams reported the incident to GUPD, including the students interviewed by the Voice.
Rory Dixon (SFS ’25) was looking for one-day tickets to All Things Go, a local music festival, when he encountered a scammer. On Aug. 26, Dixon messaged a user named Amron, who said they had tickets. The seller responded the next day and was incredibly persistent.
“They replied to me with like four consecutive texts in the space of an hour,” Dixon said.
Kamron asked Dixon to name a price for two tickets, and was willing to take what Dixon considered to be an unusually low offer.
“I said 160 dollars, thinking that would be a lowball and we’d negotiate up,” Dixon said. One of his other friends had purchased two tickets for $150 each.
The seller was quick to accept the offer and then asked Dixon for his email. Wanting to make sure he was speaking to a real student, Dixon requested that Kamron send their NetID—which they quickly refused. Dixon shared screenshots of this conversation with the Voice.
“I can send you my gocard so you know I’m not scamming lol,” Kamron wrote.
The seller sent a picture of a GOCard belonging to Kam Norasteh, a current Georgetown student, but Dixon found it odd that the user was unwilling to offer a NetID.
He also noted that until they sent the GOCard, the seller had been going by “Amron” before changing their name to “Kamron” to match the name on the card.
Dixon offered to purchase the tickets in person with cash. Kamron then suggested using Apple Pay for the transaction, telling Dixon to send them $100 and then pay the remaining $60 once he received the tickets. Dixon was hesitant to transfer such a large amount of money to someone he still hadn’t met.
“If you don’t want to meet on campus then I’m gonna walk away,” Dixon wrote.
At this point, the seller grew frustrated—they had lowered their initial ask, offering that Dixon send them just $60 instead of $100 before receiving the tickets, and got agitated that Dixon was wary of being scammed.
“You can just get from someone else if you don’t trust me im cool tbh!” the seller wrote.
Dixon walked away from the interaction without sending any money. He realized from Kamron’s changing name and unwillingness to meet in person that he was most likely dealing with a scammer, and did not buy tickets.
By the time of Dixon’s interview with the Voice, the account name had changed again to “Katherine Eileen.” While the user behind the account name is a scammer, Katherine Eileen Rose (CAS ’25) is a real student at Georgetown, and she has been dealing with the consequences of GroupMe fraud for months.
Rose was trying to get last-minute tickets to Dip Ball last April when she started searching the Ticket Exchange. Many of her friends were seniors at the time, and she was hoping to make some memories with them at the gala before graduation. It was the day of the event, and with so few tickets left, students flooded the Ticket Exchange and Selling/Bartering GroupMe chats with requests—and scammers tried to take advantage.
“So many scams were going on,” Rose said. “It was like, ‘Oh, send me this Venmo, or Apple Pay or something,’ and obviously I would be like ‘Okay, well can I verify you are the person you say you are?’”
Both sellers and buyers in the Ticket Exchange were requesting increasingly elaborate proof of identity to detect potential scammers—to get her own tickets, Rose had to send a video to the seller confirming her identity.
Rose said she is normally confident that she can spot a scam or suspicious person. In about eight other conversations Rose had with GroupMe users who seemed suspicious by their oddly formal language or excessive typos, she immediately dismissed them as potential non-students.
However, when some of the sellers sent real GOCards for identity confirmation, Rose didn’t anticipate it might be someone stealing Georgetown students’ identities.
“They went through such great lengths by basically using the GOCards of someone, and I thought that was such an obvious, ‘Oh, that has to be the person,’” Rose said.
Rose was sent a GOCard by someone pretending to be Olga Rivas, another student. Rose sent her GOCard in return to prove who she was, before ultimately deciding not to go through with the purchase. Although Rose thought the seller was a potential scammer and never sent the user any money, she didn’t exit the situation entirely unscathed.
“While they didn’t take my money, they took my name,” Rose said.
The scammer stole Rose’s GOCard and used it to impersonate her in scams over the next several months—she still receives messages from people on GroupMe and Instagram who are unsure if they are talking to the real Rose.
“This whole mess has been following me around like a black cloud ever since,” she said.
Since her identity was taken in April, Rose said she has a list of six different accounts that have used her name, and over 20 people have reached out to her about speaking to someone pretending to be her on GroupMe.
Among those scammed by an account posing as Rose are Michael Sowa (CAS ’28) and his friend Ryan Aminloo (SFS ’28). They were scammed out of $150 while trying to buy tickets to the Fisher concert on Oct. 4. Once they sent the money over to the seller on Venmo, Sowa said the account stopped responding to their messages.
Aminloo then had to call his bank to cancel the transaction.
“They had to freeze his bank account, so he couldn’t use his card,” Sowa said. “I think it’s still frozen, and it’s been like two weeks. So he’s kind of struggling right now.”
Sowa and Aminloo did not know that Rose was a real student, and haven’t reached out to her about the scam.
At first, Rose didn’t know how to resolve the situation, but once she learned that someone fell victim to a ticket scam from an account using her name, she knew she had to do something.
“It was the last straw for me, a person showing me that they got scammed out of a few hundred dollars,” Rose said. “It was so sad because when I read the messages, you could tell the person that was being scammed was so vulnerable to the situation.”
To resolve these issues, Rose directly reached out to GroupMe user support, and GroupMe deleted the accounts of people that Rose pointed out as scammers. The week before Rose’s interview with the Voice, GroupMe had shut down five different accounts.
While GroupMe support was quick to respond to her complaints, Rose noted that the admins of the Ticket Exchange GroupMe were less helpful and even removed people when they tried to call out scammers—although the Voice couldn’t verify if this was due to confusion over who was a scammer in these instances. Sowa and Aminloo were also removed from the group chat when they sent a message that the fake “Katherine Eileen” was a scammer.
“They’re just banning anyone that says anything about a scam,” Rose said. “Why is the admin banning the whistleblower essentially, or the person that’s exposing it?”
Rose realized she was banned from Ticket Exchange after calling out several scams from people using her name. The Voice found eleven other instances since Sept. 27 where users were removed from the Ticket Exchange GroupMe after mentioning scams. The GroupMe admins did not respond to a request for comment.
Sammi Deutsch (SFS ’25) knew of the scams when she searched for Gracie Abrams tickets in the Ticket Exchange GroupMe, but she didn’t think she would be one of the victims. She had been in the GroupMe for years and had previously sold and bought tickets.
“It didn’t used to be like this. I would say my freshman and sophomore year, there weren’t really any scammers in the GroupMe for the most part, so people actually used it all the time,” Deutsch said. “I was abroad last semester, and I haven’t used it in a year or so, and I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten.”
At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary to Deutsch when she messaged a seller offering tickets for $100 each—a relatively low price compared to other options. After she asked for the seller’s GOCard and NetID, she recognized them as Eli Blumenfeld, another senior she knew of on campus.
Deutsch suggested that she would send half of the money first, then the other half after receiving the tickets because she was wary of scammers.
“They were responding like a normal person, like they were saying, ‘Yeah, of course, no worries,’” Deutsch said.
However, after she sent the first half of the money through Apple Pay, she noticed that the seller stopped responding quickly. The seller first claimed that their phone died, then insisted that they hadn’t received the money and repeatedly pushed Deutsch to send money again.
Deutsch hadn’t used Apple Pay before this encounter, and although she started to become suspicious, she still sent the other half to the seller.
“I just was so excited, because I didn’t think anyone would be reselling Gracie Abrams tickets,” Deutsch said. “I was desperate to get the tickets. And also, I was in class, so I wasn’t really paying attention as much as I should have to the conversation that we were having.”
When the seller once again failed to follow through with the tickets, Deutsch knew she had been scammed.
“I started to just accuse whoever it was of being a scammer,” Deutsch said. “They were like, ‘I’m not, I’m not. I’ll meet you in person on campus if you want to exchange the tickets, we can go through there.’ And I was like, perfect. But then obviously, they never followed up with that.”
Deutsch called Apple and filed a dispute with her bank but ultimately lost the money.
For those looking to purchase tickets, the students interviewed by the Voice suggested contacting sellers outside of GroupMe, either by meeting in person or verifying their identity through email or other social media platforms. Other advice included using a traceable platform like Venmo to send money and reporting scam accounts by flagging them for fraud.
Above all, Rose said she hopes that people who experience GroupMe scams don’t blame themselves for what happened.
“If you haven’t been through it, you don’t understand what it’s like to be the victim of that situation, so I just feel that there was so much stigma around coming forward because of how many people are embarrassed of getting scammed,” Rose said. “But I know from personal experience, as someone who does think I’m very aware and have a lot of common sense, I could spot almost all of them, just not the 1% that I couldn’t.”
