B.C. FIRM TARGETS TICKET FRAUD
Amber Sekhon was a victim of ticket fraud at a recent Justin Bieber concert. Now a Vancouver firm says it has developed technology to detect fake tickets.
Amber Sekhon had been excited about March 11 for months, but it turned into a night of heartbreak.
Sekhon, a 20-year-old college student, saved her pay from a part-time job so she could go see her favourite singer, Justin Bieber, perform last month at Rogers Arena. She bought a ticket for $150 from a seller she thought was legit: He showed her receipts and ticket order info, and agreed to let her take his photo so she’d have some recourse if the deal turned out to be a scam.
Sadly, as Sekhon learned when she tried to enter the venue that night, it was indeed a scam.
She wasn’t alone — she saw “at least 60 or 70” other scam victims outside the concert, she said, and “people were furious.”
Sekhon described the scene outside the arena that night as “horrifying.” Crowds of confused and heartbroken fans stood shocked, weeping with makeup running down their faces.
She said: “Honestly, it looked like you stepped out of a horror movie.”
Sekhon and dozens of other crestfallen concertgoers were victims of ticket fraud, a phenomenon experts say is facilitated by increased online commerce and a lack of regulation, impacting millions of consumers around the world every year.
Ticket fraud has expanded into a $4-billion-a-year illicit business, according to an estimate from Iovation, a U.S.-based fraud prevention company.
And now, a Vancouver tech company says they’ve “invented a better mousetrap” to solve the problem.
“We’re just a local startup company that figured out a solution to this world problem,” said Alan Gelfand, founder and CEO of Fair Ticket Solutions.
Fair Ticket Solutions has developed a “third-party verification” platform called AuthenTICKET, which would require every ticketholder at major concerts and sporting events to “check-in,” a procedure Gelfand compares to airline travel.
“When you put a verification platform like ours in place, you can’t have fraudulent tickets any more,” said Gelfand. “The airline industry has it right. They make people check in ... and everybody does it. They know that checking in creates safety.
“It’s something that’s done millions of times a day in different industries around the world — people check in. So mandating it will keep the tickets on the grid, so that no one’s going to get a fake ticket and there’s going to be more equal distribution.”
AuthenTICKET has run pilot projects with True North Sports and Entertainment, the Manitoba-based company that owns the Winnipeg Jets, said Gelfand, adding: “This is the future.”
Back in 2010, Gelfand approached the director of ticket sales for the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Chris Stairs. They both agreed there was a problem in the industry, Stairs said this week, remembering their initial conversation in 2010. “(Gelfand) said, ‘I have an idea, there could be a mousetrap out there that could fix this.’ ”
Stairs, already a 10-year ticketing industry veteran by 2010, was intrigued right away by Gelfand’s pitch.
“The idea that we needed to introduce some sort of authentication technology to protect the consumer and keep tickets on the grid, to keep things transparent — he won me over immediately,” Stairs said.
Stairs, now a strategic adviser for Fair Ticket Solutions, said this week: “Anyone who can help fix this problem, as a ticketing practitioner, it will make my life a lot easier and the world a better place.”
Right now, counterfeiting scams, like the one that hit Vancouver’s Bieber fans last month, are the top threat in the ticketing industry, Stairs said.
Other problems also plague the ticketing sector, including the rise of “bots” (computer programs that automatically snap up large amounts of tickets), and the speculative re-selling of tickets.
AuthenTICKET could help reduce both of those issues as well, Gelfand and Stairs said, but government legislation also comes into play. Some U.S. states and Canadian provinces have enacted legislation in recent years that bans the “cyber-scalper” bots, or attempts to regulate the secondary re-selling market.
Gelfand said he is trying to raise these issues with B.C. politicians, adding: “We need to protect the consumers. The fact is, we’re an unregulated industry that needs to change.”
NDP MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert, opposition critic for arts and tourism, has tried for years to get the issue of consumer protection for ticket-buyers on the government’s agenda.
“There’s no consumer protection here, aside from going to the police,” said Chandra Herbert. “The government needs to step in with protections.”
Chandra Herbert said it’s not always common for business figures to call for increased government regulation in their own industry, but he has heard from ticket resellers requesting just that.
He said: “It’s telling, that it’s gotten so bad that you see people in the industry, who make money from ticket re-selling, they’re saying: ‘Step in, we need protection because our business is threatened by cheats.’ ”