Scores of would-be festival-goers who believed they had bought tickets for this weekend’s V Festival in Staffordshire face a weekend at home watching it on TV after falling victim to scam websites.

The music event, which is due to take place tomorrow and Sunday at Weston Park, will feature stars such as The Killers and Lily Allen on the bill.

But many music fans have had their hopes of seeing the headline acts dashed after parting with money for tickets bought through numerous scam websites posing as official outlets.

Miranda Baker paid £169 for a ticket through the vfestival.org site which turned out to be a scam.

Ms Baker said although she was speaking to her credit card company about getting her money back, she was disappointed not to be able to spend the weekend enjoying the music with her friends.

“It’s a great line-up and all my friends are going to be there and I really want to be there. I’ll probably just spend it at home now just sorting a few things out.”

Ms Baker booked her ticket through the website in April, after finding it via a Google search, and soon after received a confirmation saying her tickets would be sent through a few weeks in advance of the festival. But alarm bells started to ring when her friends, who had booked through other sites, received their tickets whereas none had been sent by vfestival.org

She said: “Last weekend I thought it was a bit strange and I went on to the website on Monday to double check.

“I put the address in of where you are supposed to write off to and it came up straight away with loads of forums saying this site is not right and that’s when I realised what had happened.”

Ms Baker is not alone in falling victim to fake ticket sites like vfestival.org, which is believed to be based in Hungary, as there have been several other bogus websites which have duped festival-goers.

However, the police and festival organisers said that a concerted effort to close down these kinds of sites meant the situation was far better this year than last year.

Bob Angus, V Festival director, said fans needed to be extremely careful where they bought tickets from.

He said: “Since the launch of the sale of tickets, we have been vigilantly pulling down any infringing sites and reporting them.”

A spokeswoman from the Metropolitan Police said its e-crime unit had worked with the internet industry to close 11 websites fraudulently purporting to sell UK festival tickets as a result of complaints from industry and Trading Standards.