U2, Green Day Ticket Scam
Copies of print-at-home tickets fool hundreds of fans
A new kind of ticket scam left as many as 250 U2 fans without seats when the band opened a sold-out three-night stand at Boston's FleetCenter on May 24th. The fans had purchased computer-printout-style tickets from scalpers, who apparently had run off multiple copies and sold the worthless documents for as much as $2,000 each. "I was just really more bummed out than anything else," says Larry Hite, 25, a marketer for a Boston radio station, who bought two bogus tickets for $400 apiece from a scalper on craigslist.com.
For U2's second night in Boston, 125 fans went home with bogus tickets. Similarly, in April, 118 Green Day fans wound up with fake tickets to a Manchester, New Hampshire, concert; officials at the Verizon Wireless Arena said they'd never seen such a thing before and allowed the fans to buy tickets at their face value, thirty-six dollars.
Counterfeit tickets have been around forever -- the Grateful Dead famously struggled with fakes -- but U2's Boston run took the problem to a new extreme. Ticketmaster's five-year-old ticketFast system allows concertgoers to print paper tickets at home. Like "hard" tickets, the ticketFast versions have bar codes that are scanned at the venue to verify their legitimacy. But the home-produced variety can be copied with nothing more than a Xerox machine. Venues started using bar-code technology in 1994 partly as a way to discourage counterfeiting. It has worked until now; before the U2 shows, FleetCenter officials received a handful of similar complaints per show. "I can't think of a recent incident at this scale," says Ticketmaster executive vice president David Goldberg. "The technology works. It's been incredibly effective in detecting counterfeiting, and where it has been detected, it lessens the impact."
But given the popularity of online scalping, many in the concert industry expect the problem to continue. "When you get that kind of whipped-up demand, the sinister elements are going to try to take advantage," says Jim Delaney, a FleetCenter spokesman. "People seemed in this case to let the 'buyer beware' message go straight out of their mind and to buy a fake ticket." To avoid such problems, Delaney says, fans should always purchase tickets through an authorized source, like Ticketmaster or the box office. Brokers add that fans should demand hard tickets rather than easily altered or copied computer printouts.
Upon leaving the FleetCenter with his girlfriend, Hite noticed an ad for a legitimate broker on the side of a cab. He called and scored two $350 tickets for U2's second Boston show. He spent a total of $1,500 -- but he saw the band. "From what I heard from people who had been sitting by me, the Thursday show was better anyway," Hite says. "So that's the silver lining."
STEVE KNOPPER
(Posted Jun 28, 2005)
