When 17-year-old Maggie McNamee tried to use her first-ever paycheck to buy Oasis tickets for her dad, what started as a lovely present turned into a nightmare when she was scammed out of £250.

Since then, the teenager has taken to social media to tackle the shame around being scammed – and has been enlisted by a major online protection company, who then treated her and her dad to real Oasis tickets.

The scam

Maggie and her dad are “really big fans” of Oasis, she said – but when the band released tickets for their reunion tour, they were among the thousands of fans who were disappointed to miss out.

So when Maggie saw a TikTok of a girl who was selling four tickets for £125 each, she was “so, so keen”, and the author seemed “like a normal teenage girl”.

She said: “Even afterwards, after I’d been scammed, I said to my mum: ‘But it seemed really real, you told me to trust my gut and my gut was telling me it was real’.

“She said: ‘It wasn’t your gut, it was your heart. It’s because you really, really wanted it.'”

When Maggie was working at Down Dog coffee shop, she said her boss recommended she only pay for one ticket at first, “just in case it’s a scam” – but the seller insisted she pay for two, with Ticketmaster screenshots to show her that she couldn’t buy a single ticket.

Asking Maggie to make a Ticketmaster account made the interaction seem legitimate to Maggie’s mum – although that account was never used and the scammer asked for bank transfers instead.

The first payment didn’t go through, so scammers sent her an alternative bank account to send the money to.

Piecing it together

The whole interaction happened in a single day, starting before the end of Maggie’s work day and lasting into the evening.

“I met my friends and we were watching the sunset, and I was in the back of the car messaging [the scammers],” she said.

“I looked up from my phone to my friends and said I just had to pay for both the tickets because the first one didn’t work.

“They’re like: ‘Maggie, don’t do that!’ It was very stressful.”

A friend contacted the seller again and was told there were four tickets left.

“That’s how I knew it was a scam,” Maggie said.

From there, she called the police, who gave her a list of places to contact, though she found herself explaining to the operator how TikTok and Instagram work.

Maggie now thinks none of it was real – even the original video might have been stolen from a legitimate account.

Looking back, she said she should have stopped after the first payment didn’t go through. She thinks the account had already been blocked by Revolut.

The next day

The next day, Maggie and her mum went to the bank, speaking to the fraud team until she got the money back.

“It was actually International Women’s Day, so they gave us cupcakes,” she said.

“I wasn’t really that upset about the money, because I knew I’d make up for it through the hours I work. I was more upset that I got scammed and that I didn’t get the tickets.”

That weekend, she made a 10-minute TikTok talking about her experience – attracting attention from more scammers advertising fake services they claimed would get Maggie her money back.

“I was like: ‘Why are you here? This video is not welcome for you.'”

From the TikTok, Maggie was also contacted by online protection company McAfee who enlisted her to help promote the mobile-first software Scam Detector.

Speaking to Express, Maggie said the video made in partnership was ready to launch as part of a campaign – and that she hoped it would help take the shame and embarrassment from scams.

“I was so embarrassed when I’d been scammed,” she said, adding that she didn’t tell her dad about the scam until this week.

And the company treated her to gifts including beats headphones, the board game Clue… and tickets to see Oasis in Wembley.

“I’m really excited,” she Maggie. “I started crying when I opened it.”