Liverpool fan and friends are conned out of £19,000 after buying 19 fake Champions League tickets

A Liverpool FC fan and his friends say they were conned out of £19,000 by scammers selling fake Champions League final tickets online.

Ray Mcdonald, from Pensby, Wirral, and his friends received their tickets on Tuesday night ahead of the final in Paris this Saturday, May 28.

But after examining the tickets - which cost £1,000 each - the group realised the PDFs were in fact fake.

After trying to contact the ticket tout, who Ray said he has bought tickets from six times this season, he realised their Twitter account had been deleted and their number was no longer in service. The 33-year-old said he has been added to a WhatsApp group with 50 fans who have been scammed out of a total of 125-150 tickets.

He has come forward to warn other fans about the scam and help to stop the same thing from happening to anyone else.

Ray told the Liverpool Echo: 'We bought 19 tickets at a grand each so we've spent £19,000 between us. It looked legit at first, I didn't think anything of it. About 11pm last night I was about to go to sleep and my phone was going mad.

'I tried to phone [the ticket tout] and it said the number was not in service anymore and at that point I was like 'I've been done here.'

In the space of six hours, Ray said he had received thousands of messages from friends and other football fans who said they'd also been scammed after paying between £1,000-£1,250 per ticket. Ray said his friends have bought a total of 40 tickets from the same ticket tout for different games this season and all of them have previously been legitimate.

After contacting his bank to try and retrieve the money he had lost, Ray said he was told because he had been provided with a ticket, albeit fake, they were unable to help him and he should