It might be Vancouver’s busiest weekend of the year, with massive crowds gathering downtown and in the West End for the finale of the Celebration of Light and the annual gay pride parade and festival.

Another crowd gathered this weekend as well: Taylor Swift fans thronged the area around BC Place Saturday night, hoping to experience the pop singer’s talents up close.

Not everyone was able to get into the building for the concert, however.

“I fully expect that we will have a large number of people who showed up to the concert and got turned away because of either fake or fraudulent tickets,” said Vancouver police Const. Brian Montague.

Craig DeCarlo was nearly one of those people. He had purchased tickets from a pair of scammers, and only realized they were fake when he saw news reports about the scam.

DeCarlo posted on CraigsList that he was looking for tickets, and within a day or two, he got a text from someone looking to sell.

“I’d done it a few times and it’s worked before,” he told CTV News. “I’ve always been apprehensive about it, but it’s never been a problem.”

The man and woman met him at his workplace with two floor tickets and a receipt. He paid $300 for the pair.

DeCarlo asked the woman to transfer the tickets to his Ticketmaster account, but she said they had been a gift from her parents and she didn’t want her mother to know about it.

“She said she just outgrew Taylor Swift and didn't want to break her parents’ hearts,” DeCarlo said.

The receipt seemed to be from the woman’s mother’s Ticketmaster account, just like she said it was.

DeCarlo took a photo of the man’s identification as a precaution, and left the transaction believing he had gotten a great deal.

“Everything seemed so trustworthy,” DeCarlo said. “They kind of looked like hipsters. They were well-spoken, well-dressed. They seemed really nice.”

Not long before the concert, however, he heard that a man and a woman had been arrested in a ticket scam.

“I called the police right away and I said, ‘I think I'm one of the people that was duped,’” DeCarlo said.

As it turns out, he was. The billing address on the receipt that the couple showed him is actually a house on West 15th Avenue that is still under construction.

Police allege that the scam dates back to October, and involved the use of fake names, false identification, and tickets to everything from concerts to sporting events to passes to Disneyland.

DeCarlo ended up buying tickets through a legitimate website. He still got to see Swift perform.

“It was an awesome show,” he said.

With files from CTV Vancouver’s Maria Weisgarber