10/31/2024
** Serious Post**
A message from Chanelle Farm-to-Table NB to anyone that has purchassed tickets or if you are planning on purchasing tickets for upcoming events***
Hi everyone!
It’s Chanelle, owner of Farm-to-Table NB. 🙂
It was brought to our attention yesterday that apparently there’s someone out there who may be trying to impersonate our business, sending messages to people in our community (who showed interest on our Facebook events), talking about unclear event cancellations and asking for credit card information for refunds.
People trying to scam others in comment sections and on our posts is not new. But sending messages to people directly is.
For fraudulent comments, you’ll often see it as new Facebook accounts claiming to be "selling tickets and getting rid of it ASAP". I always try my best to report and delete fraudulent comments, but they come in daily by the handful that sometimes it hard to keep track of when I have other business operations to tend to.
Now, when it comes to this particular situation with the message that was sent to a specific person, I’m still waiting on more information from the recepient of the email to identify details (date, time, name of person) of the person who claimed to be our business when reaching out, so we can investigate further.
To clarify and the first thing I want to address: when it comes to event bookings, all of our bookings are done through a third-party platform, called TOCK. When you find our events on Facebook, you’ll be redirecting to our booking platform (TOCK) where you can find all the information regarding the event, alongside the information to book and pay via credit card.
Me or my business doesn’t have access to credit card information, only the attendee’s information (name, phone number, email, dietary restrictions, and date of event booked).
When we issue refunds for events, we’ll NEVER ask for your credit card information. We simply need to click on a button through the booking platform to initiate the refund, and the platform itself takes care of sending the payment back on the card without 5-10 business days. Once we click on the button for a refund, the rest is out of our hands. Again, we’ll never ask for your credit card information to issue a refund.
We also can’t physically "oversell" tickets for events.
When we create the events on the booking platform TOCK, we set a maximum number of tickets that can be purchased by guests to said events. Usually this will be 14 guests, or for more popular events, 24 guests at a maximum. We do this so we can control the size of the group and keep a cozy and intimate atmosphere at the venue location.
As soon as all tickets are sold, you’ll see this message on the page: "[insert name of event — ex. Witchy Hour Dinner Party at Maven Hill Farm at Farm-to-Table NB] is sold out. " with the option of adding yourself to the waitlist below.
When this message pops up, you physically won’t be able to purchase tickets. You can be added to the waitlist, but this doesn’t require any payment and also doesn’t guarantee you any spots at an event. If cancellations does happen (which they rarely do as the platform itself has a no cancellation setting and can’t be done manually other than directly through us), then we contact people on the waitlist to offer up a spot (for which is booked, paid, and confirmed with a receipt via the platform afterwards).
Secondly, the only ways you’ll see us contacting our guests / people in our community would either be via Messenger (from our business — this page) or either from our old email ([email protected]) or our new and current email ([email protected]).
It’s so easy for scammers to change the name on a newly created email to [insert business name], but when you click on the name and the email appears below, you’ll traditionally see that it’s a very generic email (ex. ajjsojeqi_%]^[email protected]).
Thirdly, know that the only person behind Farm-to-Table NB on a daily basis is myself (Chanelle Belliveau). Margot Gaudet is the person behind Maven Hill Farm, with whom we collaborate since January on monthly events at her farm location.
Anyone else contacting members of our community and claiming to be a member of our team is simply false. We do hire seasonal staff to help with pop-up events, but none of these persons have access to our client database.
Again, this is a very unfortunate circumstance (nobody was robbed of any money) but it’s just a reality of things we end up dealing with as a small business.
Know that if EVER you receive any messages / emails or phone calls from a source that can’t be confirmed, giving vague descriptions of events without details on how many tickets booked / what event was booked / and the booking information of the guest, please forward any information our way at our current email address: [email protected], so we can look into it and take the necessary actions to catch the culprit(s).
We are sorry to anyone who may have been directly impacted or contacted by people (or person) impersonating our business.
We care deeply about this community and are always trying our best to keep everyone safe.
Thanks for your time,
— Chanelle Belliveau
Owner of Farm-to-Table NB
