A Novel Solution For Beating Ticket Scalpers
All the tickets for your favorite band sold out within 15 minutes — 10,000 tickets, how does that happen? Then within minutes you can buy the same ticket from eBay for 10 times the original amount. No wonder music fans are unhappy. Well, there may be a simple way around this and I don't know why no one has done it yet.
To thwart those pesky touts (the British term for scalper), every ticket should be personalized with the name and photo of the ticket owner. You simply couldn’t buy a ticket from someone not authorized to sell tickets, because it wouldn’t have your photo/name on it.
Aha! – you say, but the photos printed by those super-fast ticket machines would be pretty awful! Yes I know (see black & white picture at the top of this article). The door person at the venue doesn’t have to use the printed picture to confirm your identity, they have a full color version on their computer screen. 
All they have to do with the ticket is confirm that the photo on the ticket is the same as the one on the screen (can you tell they are the same photo?)
What about the technology?
What about the hassle to the buyer?
- UK airports (and many international airports) check photos all the way through the system – following passport control the photo they use was taken in the airport so it’s very current.
- Holiday venues use photo cards produced in the 2 minutes it takes to say “hello, sign here please.” The same concept could apply for concert tickets.
- Venues check every ticket for authenticity. The photo (on the authorized ticket seller’s server) would stream down at the same time.
- If you are registered with the ticket seller then your profile already contains a photo.
- What about buying a block of tickets for your friends? Most people have access (via Facebook for example) of photos for all the people they are buying for. They need them so they’d get them by email.
- If you don’t know who you are buying for, then you are in effect touting
- If you need to change a ticket, then you apply to change it. Old tickets become useless the moment the name/photo is changed so you don’t even need to recall it.
What about the hassle at the gate of the venue?
What about people buying lots of tickets and then selling them on in time to change the photo/details?
- Ticket fraud would be virtually impossible. If the ticket, with name and photo, isn’t registered on the server then it’s a forgery. If a second person has made a copy of a ticket, then the registered photo doesn’t match the person.
- A quick glance tells if the registered photo and photo on the ticket are the same, and if there’s any suspicion then they can compare the registered photo with the person standing in front of them (the photo on the ticket is only really there to remind people we’re using photo ID)
- Last minute changes – become impossible. But this is a minor inconvenience compared with being able to get into the venue legitimately and shutting down touts.
Continued on the next page
- That’s a matter for the ticket sellers. It’s easy to spot a persistent abuser because the new owner HAS TO register a change of ticket ownership.
- It’s likely that bands will take action to boycott ticket sellers that permit abuse.
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