A friend of mine had planned to go to the Download music festival in Donnington last weekend, and had been very much looking forward to 'rocking out' in the June sunshine along with thousands of other fans. Instead, she found herself stuck at home in her pyjamas watching DVDs, because her second-hand tickets never materialised: she'd been the victim of one of those arch villains of the digital age: a 'scammer'.

She'd made contact with what looked to be a genuine seller on an internet messageboard, paid for her ticket using her credit card, and trusted that the seller would keep their side of the deal. But there's very little legal redress in private sales so you need to be on your guard at all times.

Read on for some tips on how to avoid disappointment...

The moral of this story is that if my friend had heeded my advice, she could have promptly exchanged the remote control for a wristband, because I'd given her exactly the same warnings I'm about to share with you now. As a seasoned ticket buyer, my top tips for a happy ending would be:

• Get their phone number. Talking to the person won't in itself guarantee they're genuine, but it will allow you to find out enough about them to get all the information you need in case things don't work out. While it can be easy for a scammer to ignore your pleading emails, they're unlikely to give their personal number to someone they're intending to rip off.
  
  
• Don't be reassured by irrelevant details. A classic mistake made by my friend was to fall for some of the signs people commonly take to be indications that a seller is 'genuine'. She reported that the scammer wrote well and sounded 'friendly and enthusiastic' in her email correspondence, and had also mentioned that she worked in a 'respectable profession': she was a teacher. In fact, she even supplied a '.teachers' email address. This is a domain that anyone can use, and does not guarantee that the sender is, in fact, a teacher.
  


• Ask to see the tickets. With the advent of digital cameras on mobile phones, your seller has absolutely no excuse not to photograph the tickets and send them over for your approval. The image should be clear enough for you to read the print on the ticket itself, and if possible, you should examine another ticket for the event in question to make comparisons. Not all will look exactly the same, as different agencies will have their own allocations for larger events. But the basic details (face value price, time and date) should be identical. Of course, you can never be certain that the seller is actually in possession of the ticket they've photographed, which is why the next step is so important...
  

• Arrange to meet them. While this step can involve significantly more effort than receiving your tickets through the post, I believe it is the closest way to guarantee you'll get the real deal. The first sign of a scammer is a reluctance to do the transaction in person, so you should immediately blacklist anyone who refuses your request to meet. If you get a positive answer, the next consideration is safety: by following the same rules familiar to anyone who's ever internet dated, you should have no problem agreeing on a meeting point in a public location. An advantage over blind dates here is that you can also take a friend if it helps!
  

When you're desperate to attend an event - perhaps you're the last person in your circle of friends not to have bought a ticket, or it's a band you've waited all your life to see - it can be tempting to throw caution to the wind and trust the first person to come peddling tickets. You might be lucky, and I'd like to think that taking all these steps is a simple precaution. But I've seen enough people disappointed when they didn't follow them to the letter that I'd almost expect to be ripped off if I didn't take them seriously.