Preventing ticket fraud

Technology can help event organisers win the battle against illegal ticketing sales

As the pace of change and innovation in technology continues to quicken, so the opportunities and challenges it presents to all kinds of organisation are changing fast.

For large sporting events, many positive opportunities have opened up in recent years. Access to venues can now be achieved through electronic card reading machines, meaning that there is no longer a need for a ticket inspector to look at each individual ticket, allowing people to pass their entry card over a “reader”, or insert it into a slot, which then activates a turnstile and lets them into the venue.

Tickets are increasingly sent to mobile phones,
making them harder to fall into the wrong hands

This has several advantages: it is far harder for anyone to forge an electronic ticket, since the technology needed to make such a ticket is very expensive and complicated – and in any case, the specific details of the electronic ticket reading machine can be changed without the visitor knowing this. Fewer employees are needed to operate these systems, helping to reduce the cost of sporting events. And information on how many people attend an event, who they are and their contact details, can be stored in a central database, allowing the venue management to understand exactly who is at the event.

This information can then be used to contact the visitors in future, to tell them about other events or to offer them special discounts, for example. It is a very useful marketing tool for sporting businesses.

People can enter a stadium more quickly by using electronic ticket cards, and since lots of information can be held on one single small card, there is less chance of losing it – compared to the complexity of having several paper tickets for different events. Cards can also be used to pay for items during the event, such as food and drink or merchandise, if they have been equipped to act as credit cards.

Another sector that has found electronic ticketing to be a great advantage is the air travel industry. Whereas each paper ticket for a flight costs an estimated USD 10 to process, electronic tickets only cost USD 1 each. The International Air Transport Association is aiming to achieve 100 per cent electronic ticketing by the end of 2007.

At the moment, it is very hard for some airlines to be sure that a paper ticket is not forged, because tickets can be bought from any one of thousands of travel agencies. But using new technology has helped to reduce fraud, through gathering information into large databases.

The US company Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), for example, collects information from more than 20,000 travel agencies, some very small, others very large such as American Express or Travelocity. So whenever a ticket is bought, it passes this information on to the airline, collects the fare from the agency and pays it to the airline. “Our structure enables the airlines to deal with just one source for information about tickets issued and sold – and payment for them,” says ARC chief financial officer Alfred Altschul.

Electronic tickets are preventing illegal tickets
on transport systems

Centralising information helps to prevent fraud since it is easier to detect unusual patterns of behaviour, or to trace fraudulent payments by linking payments to individual passengers.

Another means of preventing fraud is to link tickets to mobile phone technology, something that is already happening with credit cards. For example, if someone steals a credit card and tries to use it to make a very large payment – larger than the card’s owner would usually make – a text message is sent to the owner’s mobile phone asking whether they are sure they want to make this payment. This allows the real owner of the card to be protected against fraud.

This technology can be used in various circumstances. Recently a man who lives in Spain received a text message telling him that his house in England was being burgled. He looked on the internet and could see the burglars inside his house, through closed circuit TV cameras linked to a website. He rang the police and they caught the burglars before they could leave the house.

While the internet can also help to make ticket operations more effective, cheap and secure, the technology can present difficulties for sporting events.

At the 2006 football World Cup in Germany, ticket fraud through fraudulent websites became a major problem. Many hundreds of people bought tickets through internet sites, paying more than USD 100,000 in total, but later discovered that they had been tricked and they never received their tickets. This included a party of school children who actually travelled to Germany but could not get into the match they wanted to see because they had been defrauded.

As a result, the World Cup organisers set up a special website to tell people about the false websites and encourage them to buy tickets from authorised sellers only. This problem is likely to be repeated at the Beijing Olympics, because so many people now buy tickets for sporting events (and other things) from internet sites. So it is recommended that there should be both an official site where tickets can be bought online, but also a site warning people not to buy tickets from certain other websites. Giving accurate, up-to-date information to the public is an important part of preventing ticket fraud.

Some sporting events insist that visitors have their names printed on their tickets and then show proof of identity, such as a passport, to confirm that they are the person named on the ticket. This has worked successfully at sporting events in countries such as Italy, where it was used during the Champions League football matches at Juventus, in Turin. It means that people take longer to get into the stadium, but it is a major disincentive to fraudsters, when everyone knows ahead of time that they will be prevented from entering a stadium unless they can prove their identity.

Other fraud prevention measures include taking fingerprints of visitors, as Disneyland has begun to do in the US. This technology may become more widespread in the coming years.