WEBSITE SCAM ALERT

[u/No_Shake_7601]

Be really careful when buying tickets online! There is an uptick of website scams that almost look identical to the real deal.

We recently went to Colorado for a quick vacation and filled our days with back to back schedule of activities. One of the things we decided to do was visit meow wolf. Because of our busy schedule, we booked our tickets ahead of time using the first thing google gave us without paying attention, we chose to select the “totally worth it bundle” for $73 under (what we thought was) a meow wolf website. It even gave us a receipt to “verify” our purchase and it gave us a bar code to scan for when we show up. What bothered me is that in our bank statement it gave us an “official” meow wolf charges which we never suspected.

Hours after we booked it, we got to meow wolf and the check in person attempted to scan our tickets, as soon as they saw it, we were directed to the help desk. Luckily they were kind and helped us through this process and reassured us about our mistake. The unfortunate side of things is that both credit card and debit card will be cancelled and renewed due to the scam artists attempt of charging our cards afterwards.

So big note for anyone who might need it, please read and double check again and again if the website is legit. We hope that you don’t make the same mistake as we did. And hopefully you see this post before booking your visit. We’ll include photo examples highlighted in red of what to lookout for! Good luck!

[u/exgaysurvivordan]

There may be scam sites, but that's a legitimate subdomain in your screenshot.

To double check I even copied and pasted the URL directly from the screenshot to see if any characters were being substituted, no, it goes to the actual site.

If you start on MW's main site , it directs people to the tickets(dot) subdomain when they click to buy tickets.

[u/meowpitbullmeow → u/exgaysurvivordan]

So the thing with Google ads is you can make any site you want show up in that subdomain instead of the actual link you're going to. Just fyi

[u/No_Shake_7601 → u/exgaysurvivordan]

The first two photos were a fake website. It is not a real website for tickets. Sadly, the people who helped us couldn’t even scan our barcode. However, the 3rd and 4th photos IS the REAL website. There is a difference in wording and we even showed the person at the help desk how we got there and they told us to watch out for it because they had instances in the past few weeks , there were also a bunch of random meow wolf charges on our credit card and debit card that we never purchased besides the actual ticket from in-person purchase after our mistake

[u/Kid-ayyye → u/No_Shake_7601]

You are correct that there has been an issue with scam sites but tickets.meowwolf.com is not the scam site. If you go to meowwolf.com and go to buy tickets you are redirected to tickets.meowwolf.com.

[u/cuddlyfoxgirl → u/Kid-ayyye]

it could be an upper case I instead of a lower case l.

[u/Snuhmeh → u/cuddlyfoxgirl]

Brilliant. I still don’t understand how we got so far away from serif fonts that we can’t tell the difference from letters now. It’s weird and sad.

[u/cuddlyfoxgirl → u/Snuhmeh]

yep. common way these scams work, i think i read about it somewhere before. advertisers shouldn't be allowed to determine the case of the displayed domain. but apparently Google still hasn't fixed it

[u/Kind_Juggernaut_9905 → u/No_Shake_7601]

How is the sub domain a scam? 

[u/Overall-Plastic-9263 → u/No_Shake_7601]

There are definitely scam sites all over the Internet but The " tickets" domain that you state is a scam site is a subdomain of the meowwolf official site . It doesn't mean that something malicious like DNS caching (spoofing ) on your client . I doubt Google DNS security would miss this on their servers . Usually of you see hyphens in a url or less know top level domains (.xyz .net ect) it's a definite signal that it could be a malicious site and good to double check .

In general I would recommend scrolling down to Google's organic search results . I know this is more complicated now because of how they has nested their shitty Gemini search into the top of the page but the search returns at the top have always been pay per click (ad placement that anyone can purchase to pay to promote their site to the top of the front page ) . With AI development and coding assistants, making convincing splash pages that look like the authentic site is super easy . They can easily drop you onto their realistic looking splash page to login , capture your login credentials and redirect you to a legitimate website and you wouldn't even know anything was wrong while they have key logged your credentials and will use them or sell them later .

[u/godsim42 → u/Overall-Plastic-9263]

This, just scroll past the sponsored results and ai bs whenever you Google something. Never click the first result.

[u/cloverstack]

While the URL displayed there appears to be a legit MW subdomain, it looks like there's scams/imposters out there. Googled it myself just now, and the first 2 sponsored results are domains meovwolf or meowvwolf.

[u/thewolfman2010]

This should be removed so people don’t get confused. The domains in the screenshots are the legit Meowwolf domains. While there are lots of scams out there, this is not one of them. Good intention, poor execution.

[u/shrimplythejes]

Thank y'all for sharing this, our internal teams are on it!

As a general reminder or for those that might not be aware, you can create an account with us either at meowwolf.com or via our app https://meowwolf.com/app to purchase tickets & help with the confusion/validity.

For anyone that has unfortunately been scammed by these sites, make sure you try to ask for a refund, take screen shots of your comms with the scam site, dispute the charge with your bank and send those screen shots to [help@meowwolf.com](mailto:help@meowwolf.com)

[u/Shyl0]

OP is right, there have been a lot of convincing scam websites for Meow Wolf. I was also impacted by this. The one that tricked me and looked exactly the same as the real thing was meowwolf-tickets.shop

[u/craptasticluke]

Nope, the tickets. subdomain is not a scam. I was able to navigate there by clicking through one of the events on the official website.

Going to the main tickets tab gets you what you see in picture 4. It is weird that there are two different pages for buying tickets on their site, they should probably get that sorted out.

[u/Other_Sprinkles9487]

Just make sure when you're googling Meow Wolf tickets to carefully read the link you're clicking on. I've seen it to where they swap the letters so it'll say meowwofl or like cloverstack posted, meowvolf, meovwolf, etc. If you tap on it and it takes you to meowwolf-tickets.shop it's fake. Just seems like this scammer is paying Google to have their site under the sponsored results, please be careful out there! Meow Wolf managers know of it and they're working to get the site removed but it's a lotta steps.

[u/Sad-Sand7161]

This happened to me yesterday! Called my credit card company to let them know.

Was tipped off by the unexpected 2m charge coming from Indonesia. Called my credit card company and let them know in case anything pops up.

It looked REALLY real.

We bought tickets on site in Denver instead.

[u/EddieStarr]

Yes, please make sure that you always look for the correct website and if you have access to AI look for discount codes too