PARIS (AP) — Based on their experience of hosting Taylor Swift, the management team at the Paris venue for Celine Dion 's grand concert comeback is bracing to deliver devastating news to hundreds of her fans: ‘Sorry, you appear to have been scammed, your tickets are fake.’
The Grammy-winning star's long-awaited return to the concert stage after years away from touring has unleashed massive pent-up demand for tickets. It's a perfect storm for scammers who have wormed their way into fans' online communities and set up fraudulent ticketing websites to manipulate and rob fans of both their money and hopes of being able to say, “I was there.”
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FILE - A poster featuring the French title of Céline Dion's song "If That's What It Takes," promoting autumn concerts in France on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
FILE - Celine Dion performs in Paris, France, during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)
FILE - Taylor Swift performs at the Paris Le Defense Arena as a part of her Eras Tour concert in Paris, May 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly, File)
FILE - Singer Celine Dion performs during her first World Tour called Courage in Quebec City, Montreal, Canada on Sept. 19, 2019. (Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
“Where there is massive demand and widespread excitement, fraudsters see a golden opportunity,” says Group-IB, a Singapore-based cybersecurity firm that works with the international police agency Interpol and others.
The first of the 26 shows is Saturday.
Here are some tips to avoid the traps:
The Plenitude Arena, hosting Dion for 16 dates in September and October and another 10 in May, says the highest risk of scams is when tickets first go on sale — which was April for the upcoming concerts and June for the 2027 series — and in the shows' immediate build-up.
“That's when the public will be very exposed to these scammers,” Céline Trioux, the arena's marketing director, said in an Associated Press interview.
“People are going to wake up and think, ‘Oh, right, I didn’t get a ticket, everyone is going, I want to go,' or ‘I’ve seen the first show all over social media, it looks amazing, I’m going to find a ticket by any means possible.’ And that’s also when the scammers will be out in force.”
The shows sold out immediately, although a few VIP packages with Champagne and other perks are still available for between 1,099 euros and 2,990 euros (US$1,276 and $3,473) on the arena's website.
One other possibility is to buy tickets from people who no longer want theirs. But the only way to do that safely is on three sites that are authorized for resales: AXS France, Ticketmaster France and Fnac Spectacles, Trioux said.
There are unlikely to be many of those. Generally, just 4% to 8% of people who buy tickets for the arena end up not wanting or not being able to use them.
“I strongly advise against buying a ticket from an individual or from someone advertising it on social media, because there's no way to know whether it's genuine or whether the same ticket will also be sold to other people,” Trioux said.
Group-IB says it found an array of fraudulent websites that impersonated official ticketing platforms as well as the official sites for Dion and for the arena.
Some URL web addresses were close to the real thing, like celinedion.co (instead of celinedion.com), ticketmaster-celinedion.fr (instead of ticketmaster.fr ) or axs-billetterie.com (instead of axs.com ).
"The first reflex should always be to check the website's URL," Trioux said.
She said lawyers identified nearly 200 fraudulent Dion-related sites and social media accounts that offered tickets but that “when we shut down one copycat website, another one opens."
"It's a constant battle,” Trioux added. “It's impossible to close them all because technology is advancing faster than legal authorities can act.”
The Paris concert section of Dion's site has clickable links to all of the authorized ticket sellers.
Group-IB says fraudsters appear to have reused scamming tools that were also deployed to target Oasis fans when the Britpop band reunited for a tour in 2025 and during Swift's 2023-2024 Eras tour.
When Swift played four Paris shows in 2024, the Plenitude Arena had to turn away about “400 to 500 people who had been duped," Trioux said.
She said that for Dion, the arena is expecting possibly hundreds of fraud victims each night.
The concert series is a major milestone for the 58-year-old Quebec-born singer, her first since she revealed in 2022 her diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. She last performed briefly in Paris at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in 2024, wowing with “Hymne à l’amour” (Hymn to love) from atop the Eiffel Tower in the rain.
Fans are traveling from far afield to reconnect with one of the most decorated artists in pop music history. For those who have been scammed, the shock could be brutal.
“We'll have a complaints desk for all these people, because they will generally discover the problem at the entrance, when they present their fake ticket," Trioux said.
"Staff will be there to receive them and explain the procedure to follow if they wish to file a police complaint.”
FILE - A poster featuring the French title of Céline Dion's song "If That's What It Takes," promoting autumn concerts in France on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
FILE - Celine Dion performs in Paris, France, during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, July 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)
FILE - Taylor Swift performs at the Paris Le Defense Arena as a part of her Eras Tour concert in Paris, May 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly, File)
FILE - Singer Celine Dion performs during her first World Tour called Courage in Quebec City, Montreal, Canada on Sept. 19, 2019. (Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — A television game show in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos has an unforgiving rule: Speak English and you lose. For a U.S.-born millennial in the audience and a student of her parents' mother tongue, the high-stakes setting is a perfect classroom.
Meanwhile, a 15-year-old Canadian speaks to a teacher about 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away in Zimbabwe, learning a language her parents feared she would never speak.
“Mhoroi,” Nyashadzashe Machingura says cheerfully with a pronounced Canadian accent while greeting in Zimbabwe's vernacular Shona.
The scenes capture a new generation of interest and entrepreneurship around African languages once pushed to the margins by decades of colonialism. Often seen as secondary to English, French and Portuguese, they are enjoying a renaissance that is also creating business opportunities.
Africa is home to over 1 billion people speaking roughly a third of the world’s languages, with between 1,500 and 3,000 across 54 countries, according to UNESCO.
Experts say the revival in some of them is driven partly by second- and third-generation Africans in the diaspora finding it easier to reconnect with their roots and communicate with older relatives, thanks to social media, online learning and entertainment.
“There were times I definitely felt left out because my family around me were all speaking Shona. And I just couldn’t understand them,” Nyashadzashe said after a lesson covering traditional greetings, proverbs and ancestral clan symbols. She said she had eaten the food and worn the traditional clothing but still felt left out.
But now her conversations with her grandparents in Zimbabwe are growing longer.
“Being able to connect with them on that level makes me really proud of my heritage,” she said.
Her Zimbabwe-based tutor, Shungu Chidovi, left her banking career in January to focus full-time on ZimbOriginal, an online platform that teaches Shona through storytelling, book clubs and “buddy pairing” exchanges.
Now she teaches about two dozen learners in Zimbabwe, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and Scotland, charging $50 a month.
The business, part of a small but growing number of online initiatives teaching African languages, emerged almost by accident. Chidovi began writing a blog about Zimbabwean traditions in 2016. Readers began asking whether she taught Shona.
“I didn’t see it at the time that I was really writing about the Shona language,” Chidovi said.
Like many in Africa, she grew up with the understanding that to get ahead she had to embrace Western languages instead of her mother tongue. English remains the dominant language for education, business and government affairs in the southern African nation that officially recognizes 16 mostly Indigenous languages.
“When you talk of Africa, you talk of English, French, Portuguese,” said Believe Mubonderi, a linguistics lecturer at Zimbabwe Open University. His research notes the importance of ensuring that African languages have a place in technologies shaping how people communicate, learn and trade.
“In most cases, African languages were sidelined. They were never exposed or modernized to be used in commerce, science and technology," he said. "When a language has a very low status, there’s a danger that that language eventually becomes endangered.”
Governments and international organizations are trying to reverse that trend.
The African Union’s 2022 decision to adopt Kiswahili, spoken in much of east Africa, as an official working language has raised its international profile. The United Nations declared 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.
And the AU continental body and UNESCO are supporting efforts to document and revitalize African languages, including using artificial intelligence to generate and translate children's books and teacher guides.
But there's a steep digital disadvantage. UNESCO says only 10 languages around the world dominate the "internet ecosystem,” while less than 2% of African languages have a meaningful online presence. That leaves many with too little data to train artificial intelligence systems.
Still, momentum for change is growing, with much of it from Africans abroad.
“People of African descent have come to realize that we also have our own identity which we need to embrace and be proud of. You go on Facebook, you go on TikTok, you are seeing many different efforts,” Mubonderi said. Younger diaspora Africans "are trying by all means to revive, to revitalize, to make use of these languages.”
Chindovi said she hears that desire from children and their parents.
“When people are away from home, they long for home more than when they are home," she said.
That hunger for connection is also reshaping culture.
In Nigeria, a game show called “Masoyinbo,” meaning “Do not speak English,” has turned Yoruba, one of the country's most widely spoken languages, into prime-time entertainment. Contestants, including diaspora Nigerians, are tested on Yoruba language and culture, with prizes reaching thousands of dollars.
Host Olalekan Fabilola, who started the show in 2024, sees its popularity as part of a wider shift.
“If ‘Masoyinbo’ had started like 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have been what it is now," he said. “But we are in the age of cultural resurgence. People want to go back to their roots. Everyone wants to know why, where they are from, and so it’s timely.”
Tomi Adeshokan, a New Jersey resident who is learning to perfect her Yoruba with Fabilola as a tutor, was part of the audience during a recent recording of the show. She said she lost daily exposure to Yoruba after moving out of her father’s home before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, she joined Clubhouse just to hear the language and later began taking classes. Now she was back visiting family.
“It’s very important for us to immerse ourselves in our culture and not to fully identify with other cultures, like the American, the Western culture," Adeshokan said.
Ikpoyi reported from Lagos, Nigeria.
For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse
The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Muslim faithful sing and march to mark Prophet Muhammad's birthday, known as Mawlid, on the street of Lagos, Nigeria, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
Vincent Tabat smokes a waterpipe inside a nightclub in Sokoto, Nigeria, July 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
FILE - Women, with children on their backs, carry out chores in Epworth, Zimbabwe, on Nov. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Aaron Ufumeli, File)
