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That's Not the Ticket
Insight on the News, Jan 1, 2001 by Eric Fisher
Teams need new methods to foil ticket counterfeiters. At risk is the interest of fans, already showing their dissatisfaction with the high cost of attending sporting events.
The sports ticket, for decades just ink on heavy paper, has become the focus of a fierce struggle that could change how teams interact with fans. On one side of the battle are teams, leagues and printing companies, each trying to produce and sell tickets that are inexpensive and easy to make, attractive to collectors and hard to copy. On the other side g and, by many accounts, gaining significant ground -- are counterfeiters using home computers, scanners and high-end color copiers and printers to reproduce tickets with startling success.
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Dozens of sports teams already have embraced untearable papers, digital bar coding, custom holograms, special varnishes and ultraviolet inks -- just about anything to keep forgeries out of their buildings. And a once-insular sports industry is taking cues from such outside organizations as the U.S. Mint.
"It's unbelievable what regular people have been able to do, on their own computers or even down at their local Kinko's" says Kirk Schulz, president of Premier Southern Ticketing, a Cincinnati company that prints tickets for many teams. "The look is sometimes really identical. We first went from traditional black ink to full color, and they found a way to beat that. We then started seeing a lot of holograms, and people were getting holograms from their local craft shop and working those in. We as an industry have had to work hard to stay a step ahead"
For decades, counterfeiting has been a small, steady and often unpublicized part of professional sports. But as ticket prices have soared in the last five years, along with interest in prime seat locations, so has interest in making a quick and handsome buck from fakes. Ticketing-industry executives estimate that popular sporting events, ranging from the Super Bowl to a sold-out New York Yankees regular-season game, usually have at least 300 people trying to get through the turnstiles with counterfeit tickets -- a number increasing in many cities. While 300 fakes in an 18,000-seat arena or 65,000-seat football stadium might not seem like a large number, it can cost teams tens of thousands of dollars a game. And every team is loath to gain the substantial bad press and customer-relations problems that such counterfeits can produce.
"We've been in contact with the other leagues to exchange ideas and information, and unfortunately this is something that has hit us all to some degree" says Kevin Hallinan, senior vice president of security and facilities management for Major League Baseball (MLB). This fall's World Series was the latest major draw for counterfeiters, and Hallinan and his staff recorded 11 arrests before Game 1 that depressed sales of forgeries for the rest of the Series.
The primary security tool to prevent forgeries for both sports tickets and licensed apparel is the hologram, a time-honored tool used frequently in concert ticketing. But quality custom holograms are expensive to reproduce, even in mass quantities. The cost to print tickets with a custom-designed hologram can exceed $2 each -- exponentially higher than ordinary paper tickets that cost between 8 and 12 cents each to print. "If a team or a promoter is really concerned about counterfeiting, the sky is basically the limit in terms of design and customization, but it does come with a price," notes Don Andrews, president of QuickTick, a Houston ticket-printing company.
But the ticket-taker himself can be a problem with holograms, according to Schulz. "Most of the takers at the turnstiles are usually either somebody retired or a kid" he says. "And after taking several thousand tickets, they're just not looking that closely anymore, so a lot of different holograms can pass through"
Another popular technology is ultraviolet inking, a technology advanced by the U.S. Mint. All new U.S. paper money is embedded with specially dyed threads that show up yellow and red under special ultraviolet (UV) lights. Though violet ultraviolet ink is common, other UV colors are available only to commercial printers that pass clearance checks. "We've definitely taken cues from the U.S. Mint" says Schulz. "They've obviously needed to push the ball forward."
Bar coding is rapidly gaining acceptance. Three MLB teams -- the San Francisco Giants, Baltimore Orioles and Cleveland Indians -- and a handful of NBA and NHL teams place individual bar codes on the backs of all tickets. A successful read of a bar code by an optical scanner installed inside the turnstiles allows fan entry through the gate. A duplicate bar code or poor read by the scanner instantly signals a likely forgery to ushers.
Smart cards have become a long-range idea within ticket-industry circles. Instead of any type of paper ducat, fans would receive a plastic card embedded with a computer chip encoded with data corresponding to games for which the fan purchased seats.
