The fan had tickets stolen from his Ticketmaster account

An Orange County man had tickets to one of Central Florida's hottest sporting events, but just days before the game, the tickets were suddenly transferred from his account to a stranger without his permission.

Do you have a consumer complaint or need help from Jeff Deal and Action 9? Click the banner below to submit a tip.

Andrew McCoy loves college football. He was excited about the prospect of the University of Colorado football team traveling to Orlando to play the UCF Knights. He bought tickets to the high-profile matchup months before last month's game.

McCoy told Action 9 consumer investigator Jeff Deal: “Deion Sanders and his son. You know, it’s a big deal in college football, so I wanted to experience it firsthand.”

The crowd at the Bounce House was sold out and he knew the atmosphere for the game would be electric.

But on Tuesday morning, four days before Saturday's game, McCoy woke up to an email from Ticketmaster with the message: Your ticket transfer is on the way to baby! A minute later another email followed with the following content: Big Jugg has accepted your ticket transfer! The messages were sent around 12:30 a.m. while he was sleeping.

“I kind of woke up half dazed and kind of thought I was in a nightmare, you know? So I watched and read it about three times, and I thought, “Wait a minute, this is real,” he said.

He claims a Ticketmaster employee assured him over the phone that they would help him get his tickets back. But he showed us online chats from later in which he asked if the issue would be resolved before the game. The company's feedback indicates that the situation is still being reviewed. When the game began, the situation was still unresolved and McCoy had not returned his tickets.

He said: “They didn’t care. And I approached them as nicely as I could to let them know that, hey, the game is this Saturday. I just want to go to the game.”

An online search shows he is not alone. In Action 9, dozens of Ticketmaster customers reported that tickets had also been stolen from their accounts. Many of the complaints were made public in the months following Ticketmaster's massive data breach in May. Personal data from up to 500 million customers was stolen.

Ticketmaster sent the following statement:

Overall, our digital ticketing innovations have significantly reduced fraud compared to the days of paper tickets and duplicate PDFs. Using this digital history, we are also able to investigate the situation and restore fans' tickets. The best way for fans to protect themselves is to set a strong, unique password for all accounts – especially their personal email addresses, which we often see create security issues. Scammers are looking for new scammers in all industries, and tickets will always be a target because they are valuable. That's why Ticketmaster is constantly investing in new security improvements to keep fans safe.

The company does not believe McCoy's incident was a result of the breach. It noted that Ticketmaster's passwords were not exposed in the data breach earlier this year and that the company is able to recover almost all tickets because of the security measures built into its mobile tickets.

It wasn't an ideal situation for Andrew McCoy. He said: “I was immediately frustrated. I was angry, you know? At that point I didn’t know what to do.”

He actually made it to the game, but only because he spent even more money buying new tickets. He said the tickets were more expensive and the seats were not as good as the seats he originally purchased.

After McCoy contacted Action 9, Ticketmaster refunded him for the new tickets. However, he believes the matter should have been resolved before the event. He said: “I just think it shows the huge disconnect between big companies and their attitude towards us outsiders. “They don't actually care.”