Laura Petrecca

USA TODAY

NEW YORK CITY — Christopher Plant felt uneasy.

The ticket seller he contacted via Craigslist arrived late. And it was odd that the man, who claimed to have seen the hit musical Hamilton, couldn't answer many questions about the show.

Yet the four Hamilton tickets "looked fantastic," says Plant. They had the theater location, performance date, a barcode and the word “ticketmaster” emblazoned on them. The tickets and a printed receipt were tucked in an envelope bearing the Ticketmaster name.

Face value for regular Hamilton seats, sold out through January, are $139 to $177 - but priced hundreds, even thousands, higher on secondary markets. Plant thought he was getting a good deal when he handed over $1,000 for four tickets.

“I’m no dummy," he says. "I was on guard."

That evening, while trying to enter the Richard Rodgers Theatre with his family, he was told they were phony.

“I asked my wife to take the kids to get a cup of coffee so they wouldn’t see a grown man cry,” he says. “I got duped.”

The Philadelphia real estate agent is among the many who have bought Hamilton tickets only to discover they were counterfeit or duplicates of legitimate tickets already in use. For fans, it's not only the lost money - it's also the lost opportunity to see the musical sensation.

Bogus Broadway tickets are rare, says Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League, a national trade association for the Broadway industry. When crooks strike, they target popular performances such as Hamilton, The Book of Mormon and The Lion King.

And right now, Hamilton is the hottest theater ticket in town. It dominated the Tony Awards on Sunday, winning 11 honors, including best musical. It's is sold out through January, with tickets on the secondary market going for hundreds, even thousands, more than their face value.

The contract for the original cast members is up on July 9, with few details yet on who is going and who is staying. Creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda says he plans to leave this summer.

“I can see the scammers and counterfeiters just licking their chops,” says Tom Bartholomy, a fraud expert and CEO of the Better Business Bureau in Charlotte.

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To be sure, warnings about fake tickets appear to being paying off. Hamilton publicist Sam Rudy didn't provide statistics but says the box office has reported a drop in invalid tickets recent months.

Still, scammers have a lot of motivation. On StubHub, tickets have sold for an average of $687 and a maximum of $5,018 since Hamilton's Broadway opening. The face value for regular tickets recently increased to between $179 to $199 and premium tickets to $849.

“It’s the most valuable ticket, therefore the most profitable crime to commit,” says Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance.

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The swindle goes beyond Times Square. The hip-hop-infused tale of founding father Alexander Hamilton’s life launches a national tour next year and a separate production in Chicago starts Sept. 27. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan already issued a warning about websites selling tickets that have not gone on sale to the general public. “Consumers can find themselves paying higher prices for what turn out to be undesirable seats or even counterfeit tickets,” she said.

Counterfeit tickets aren't the only scam. Theatergoers are also derailed when a legitimate e-ticket is distributed to more than one person.

"Whoever shows up first will get into the seat and the others are out of luck," says Ticketmaster North America President Jared Smith. Ticketmaster, an official ticketing provider for Hamilton, guarantees that all primary and resale tickets on its Ticketmaster site are valid for entry.

Smith says the swindlers are incredibly sophisticated, using "thousands of credit cards" which makes it hard to detect and penalize them.

Tech investor and Shark Tank guest judge Chris Sacca and his wife, Crystal, got bitten by a bad StubHub ticket sale in May. Sacca says Crystal spent thousands of dollars to buy Hamilton seats as a birthday gift for him. When they arrived, the tickets came up as already checked in. On May 18, Uber board member and senior vice president of operations Ryan Graves tweeted: “Showed up at Hamilton and was sold a fake ticket,” tagging @StubHub.

It can be "devastating,” for people who can't get in, says Sally Greenberg, executive director at the National Consumers League advocacy group. “Buyers may have organized their entire trip to New York City over these tickets.”

StubHub, an eBay unit, says invalid sales happen less than 1% of the time, and sometimes they aren't scams, but a seller mistake.

Because Hamilton is such a high-profile show, StubHub is revamping some of its processes around the musical. Instead of reacting on the off-chance a ticket is invalid, it buys extra tickets in advance in case people are denied entry. If a thwarted ticket buyer calls customer service, and StubHub has the extra ticket, it will send a representative with a new ticket to meet the purchaser outside the theater that night. If StubHub doesn't have a ticket for that night, it will offer up a ticket for other dates.

StubHub is paying “extra attention and care in a proactive way,” says StubHub spokesperson Jessica Erskine. For most other events that it sells tickets for, StubHub doesn't buy tickets in advance. Instead it will only seek to buy a replacement ticket after any troubles with entry have occurred. .

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Scams reach outside the Great White Way to sporting events and concerts across the country. Swindlers not only list tickets on legitimate websites, they also set up phony websites that resemble authentic ticket seller sites, and then use search engine optimization to drive consumers to their bogus sites, says the Better Business Bureau's Bartholomy. His advice: "Do some research" before buying, and check out the seller's score on the BBB site bbb.org.

Vivid Seats and Razorgator and Ticketsnow all have A+ ratings. StubHub has an A. SeatGeek has a B+.

Craigslist has an F.

"Sure, there are some tickets that are valid on Craigslist, but if you want to defraud someone, Craigslist is a great way to do that," says National Consumers League’s Greenberg.

Craigslist, which didn’t reply to requests for comment, has a page with advice on how to avoid fraudulent schemes, as well as an online form to report a scam.

Those who do fall prey typically get caught up in the excitement of seeing a show, and don't realize they should scrutinize ticket sellers extremely closely.

People "are looking for any lifeline that they can get to purchase what they think are real tickets, and in doing so they are making some errors in judgment," says Manhattan DA Vance, adding, "The good thing about humans is that we are instinctively looking for the good in people."

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Plant, who successfully used Craigslist for past purchases, says that he, his wife and two sons were all incredibly enthusiastic about seeing the show.

After being told his tickets were fake, he, his wife and sons went out for an Italian dinner and browsed through a comic book shop. Later, he posted his tale on Facebook, saying in part: "Licking my wounds but my optimism in humanity remains intact. I thought I had vetted these as well as needed but my enthusiasm got in front of my intellect."

Contributing: Rui Miao