Metro

Woman sets up sting after Craigslist ‘Hamilton’ scam

Danielle Posner was deflated but determined when she marched into the 33rd Precinct station house last Friday.

She’d been looking forward to that night for eight months — finally getting to see the hit play “Hamilton” with her boyfriend. But when she called Ticketmaster to double-check the event codes, they came back invalid: The $350 tickets she’d bought from a Craigslist seller were fake.

Yet her tale of woe barely registered a blip on the radar of the busy cop manning the complaint-room window in the Washington Heights precinct.

“We have murders around here,” he told her.

“Well, he murdered my dream of going to ‘Hamilton,’” she said.

The 29-year-old special-ed teacher insisted the cop look at the documents she brought: printouts of the Craigslist ad, the fake tickets and photos of the text conversation with the scammer.

She also told the officer she had already set up a sting to catch the killer of her Broadway dreams. Posner’s boyfriend responded to the same deceptive Craigslist ad and planned a ticket-pickup rendezvous with the fraudster that very afternoon. She needed the cops to be there.

The NYPD agreed to step in, and 10 anti-crime unit officers were assigned to the sting.

Plainclothes Police Officer Emmanuel Portorreal posed as the boyfriend for the face-to-face meeting with the Bronx seller on the corner of West 168th Street and Broadway.

The other officers were scattered in four unmarked cars as backup, with Posner positioned in the front seat of one car in order to visually ID the Broadway bandit.

As Portorreal approached the alleged crook, Posner gave a thumbs-up to an officer who called Portorreal and said, “It’s him.”

As soon as the cash was exchanged, Portorreal slapped a pair of cuffs on the alleged counterfeiter, Glenn Richardson.

“I was so happy,” Posner recalled. “Losing $350 to get somebody who has probably done this to so many people was worth it.”

Richardson, 29, had been busted for hawking fraudulent tickets before. He sold two fake Knicks tickets in 2011 for $320, according to police sources.

He was charged in the 33rd Precinct with four counts of possession of a forged instrument, petit larceny and misapplication of property, cops said.

Posner had wanted the two $175 tickets for Broadway’s hottest show — which is sold out a year in advance and where secondary-market tickets sell for upwards of $1,300 — to celebrate a rare vacation from work.

She thought she was dealing with a reputable seller who went by the name Paul Jones.

“I really thought they were legit. I go to a show once a month and the tickets looked dead on,” Posner said of the counterfeit Ticketmaster vouchers for the Feb. 19 show.

Crooks have been slinging fistfuls of fake “Hamilton” tickets to eager theatergoers at the rate of “at least five times a week,” a representative of the Richard Rodgers Theatre said. The “majority of the counterfeit tickets are from Craigslist,” the rep added.

New York Yankees announcer Michael Kay was one of the victims. He was duped out of two $167 tickets by a Craigslist scammer a few weeks ago.