It’s Caveat Emptor When It Comes to Buying Game Tickets on Street

Buyer beware.

Overeager fans from Super Bowls past, willing to purchase at any price a seat to professional football’s greatest game, turned to the street for tickets.

And they paid dearly.

At Super Bowl XVII in Pasadena, a group of fans bought tickets to sit in Row 100. To their chagrin, they found out when they arrived at the Rose Bowl that the stadium ends about Row 77.

At Super Bowl XIX in Palo Alto, more than a dozen fans approached the turnstiles carrying tickets that, when scanned with black light, also proved to be counterfeit. The turnstiles were as far as they got.

At this season’s Super Bowl XXII in San Diego, it has now been estimated by some security officials that as many as half of the 74,500 fans in Jack Murphy Stadium on Jan. 31 could be holding tickets purchased from scalpers.

Calculated Risk

Some of those tickets will inevitably turn out to have been lost, stolen or counterfeited. That means fans buying tickets from scalpers do so at a calculated risk.

Officials coordinating security for the big game said people holding unauthorized tickets not only will be ejected from the stadium, but could find themselves called as witnesses in a criminal prosecution.

“The guy who buys a stolen ticket is considered a part of the crime and he will be escorted from the stadium,” said Jim Steeg, the National Football League’s director of special events.

San Diego Police Department Lt. Bob Jones, an expert on stadium security, recalls the fate of past Super Bowl fans with worthless tickets.

“Those people who bought those tickets were removed,” he said. “They lost their money. The only seat they got was in the courtroom to testify against the thief who snookered them.”

Added Stephen L. Gardella Jr., a private security consultant who is providing the ticket-takers and ushers for the upcoming NFL title match:

“If it happens, we’ll know as soon as two people try to sit in the same seat . . . and we’ll be waiting to see who takes that seat. That’s stolen property. That’s a criminal offense.”

Gardella offered two hypothetical cases in which stolen or lost tickets could become problems for the fans who later purchase them.

One involves a wealthy La Jolla man who reports that his home was burglarized a couple of days before the game and that one of the items purloined was a bank of 10 tickets. The second scenario involves a New York businessman who arrives in San Diego on Super Bowl weekend and suddenly realizes he left his two tickets at home on the East Coast.

In both cases, the victims will be presented compensatory ticket passes if they can show proof of purchase and provide police reports, and the NFL is able to authenticate the loss, a league official said.

Police will then be alerted, and security officers will be watching to see if the tickets have been resold to a fan claiming those seats on game day.

Familiar With Bowl

Ticket-takers at Super Bowl XVII in Pasadena were able to spot bogus tickets for Row 100 because they were familiar with the Rose Bowl and knew the stadium’s highest rim was Row 99.

“They were very good counterfeits,” said Lt. Roger Kelley, a member of the Pasadena Police Department who has worked four Super Bowls there.

“The face of the tickets were identical. All the scalpers were selling them out in front of the stadium. There were a few arrests, most of the tickets were seized and people were not allowed inside the turnstiles. People got all upset.”

Steeg said a Honolulu man produced and circulated a thousand counterfeit tickets for Super Bowl XIX. He said the scam was rather elaborate in that the man used a small network of printers to provide different elements in creating the bad tickets.

But the scheme took a detour when an authorized ticket broker realized the bogus tickets were being sold well below the market for scalped tickets. He notified NFL security.

Ink Didn’t Appear

Steeg said authorities were able to identify the man and seize most of the tickets. He said they determined the tickets were no good after a special ink hidden in authentic tickets did not appear when the bogus ones were scrutinized under a black light.

Still, he added, about 20 fans showed up on game day with the bad tickets. They missed the game.

Law enforcement officials in San Diego may not have such an early jump on seizing counterfeited tickets. To date, they said, no organized counterfeit operations have been identified here. But already, at least one man has fallen victim to a ruse, and he didn’t see any tickets.

A 35-year-old Clairemont man was pistol whipped and robbed of $8,500 in cash and travelers checks Saturday, police said. He visited a man at the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina on the premise of paying the money for 10 Super Bowl tickets. The assailant never showed tickets; he displayed a revolver instead.

League officials said fans considering buying tickets from scalpers have the option of visiting with Jack Murphy Stadium officials to verify whether the tickets are real. But Steeg pointed out that no one in his right mind selling “hot” tickets would accompany a potential customer to the stadium’s special ticket center.

Officials said this year’s tickets were made with special paper fibers and are laminated--preventive measures that make counterfeiting difficult. In addition, Steeg said the tickets carry another secret identification, similar to the hidden ink used in the past.

Gardella, a former San Diego police polygraph examiner and documents expert, said his 245 ushers and ticket-takers for the Super Bowl, many of whom regularly work Chargers games, will be well-trained in spotting fake tickets.

He said there are several ways to spot a counterfeit ticket.

“The ink may not be right,” he said. “The paper may be different. Sometimes you can feel a different weight in the ticket. The dyes used may vary.

“Are the numbers of the same magnitude and stripe? Are the paper fibers the same? Is the spelling correct? Microscopically, on the face of the ticket, is the picture the same? How about the detail of the picture? And the number of perforations where the ticket is torn, do they match up? What about water marks?”

Willing to Counterfeit

He said that as many ways as there are to phony-up a ticket, there is an equal number of people willing to counterfeit.

“All you need is some guy who’s a good printer that’s con-wise who wants to take a risk,” he said. “There’s always somebody who wants to beat the system because of greed.”

Jones, the police lieutenant, said it was not uncommon for unauthorized tickets to pass through several sets of hands, ending in a situation where “John Doe has really no way of knowing to whom those tickets were meant to go.”

“The guy who comes into the stadium in possession of bad tickets, he’s out of luck,” Jones said. “He’s out of there.”