Leafs, Raptors take on the counterfeiters
NHL, NBA teams move toward paperless ticketing
TORONTO — The Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors are eliminating print-at-home tickets, hoping the move will limit fraud and transition customers into ticketing’s paperless future.
Starting this fall, only two options will remain for Raptors and Leaf games — mobile tickets, or tickets printed on cardboard stock. Toronto FC will extend the print-at-home option through the end of this season before expanding its mobile ticketing program in 2019, said MLSE chief commercial officer Dave Hopkinson.
According to Hopkinson, printat-home tickets had become increasingly easy to counterfeit, leading to multiple cases of fraud at most Raptors and Leafs games. He said most people turned away for trying to use fake tickets had bought them unwittingly, from resellers who peddled duplicates.
Moving to mobile, he says, will make counterfeiting tickets nearly impossible.
“We’re seeing more than 10 ejections and rejections a night … and these are the (counterfeit tickets) we know about,” Hopkinson said. “It’s overwhelmingly people who have been duped. Those are real tears.”
Hopkinson says all of MLSE’s teams will likely move to completely paperless ticketing by 2020, and elsewhere other pro sports outfits have made the switch. The Montreal Canadiens charge a fee to print tickets on stock, but use mobile device tickets otherwise. This season the Los Angeles Kings also moved to a paper-free ticket platform.
Last fall the NFL and Ticketmaster entered a multi-year deal to convert the league to a digital ticketing program.
“This partnership lays the groundwork for where the ticketing industry can go,” said Jared Smith, president of Ticketmaster North America last October. “We’re actively building both our business model and our technology to empower content-owners to operate in a new way.”
Major League Soccer’s Orlando City S.C. switched to digital tickets this season, and reported a sharp decrease in cases of ticket fraud.
“We have a very tech savvy fan base,” said Orlando’s chief revenue officer Chris Gallagher, in an interview with Sport Techie. “We needed to have a mobile solution that we felt comfortable in promoting to that type of fan base.”
Hopkinson says MLSE has spent the last 18 months studying its season ticket holder database, aiming to learn which customers are professional ticket resellers. He says the move to mobile ticketing will allow the team to track more easily which reselling platforms season ticket holders are using, and yield a better idea of which users might be violating the ticket buyers’ code of conduct.
“With mobile, you can follow the chain of legal ownership,” Hopkinson said. “It’s not perfect, but it gets better every day.”
Last year the Blue Jays partnered with secondary sales platform StubHub, citing a similar desire to make selling and transferring tickets simpler and less prone to fraud. Spokesperson Cameron Papp applauds teams and leagues working to stop ticket fraud, but worries they might suppress the effortless transfer of tickets that companies like StubHub facilitate.
“Counterfeit tickets are virtually a non-issue (with paperless ticketing),” Papp said. “We support any technology that improves the fan experience. … But we don’t support it when mobile entry is introduced to curb secondary activity. Fans should have the right to freely transfer their tickets at any point of sale.”