Well Spent: Scalped ticket got him into concert -- briefly

Jerry Poffenroth thought he was acting cautiously when he made a ticket scalper escort him to the front door of KeyArena for the Paul McCartney concert a couple of weeks ago.

"As I was suspicious that the ticket would not be valid and perhaps fraudulent, I didn't complete the transaction until the bar code was scanned by the ticket taker," Poffenroth wrote from Mukilteo.

However, he found his seat occupied and when he sought an usher for help, the usher discovered that Poffenroth's ticket was invalid. Poffenroth was asked to leave the building and his ticket was confiscated.

Question: How could the ticket have been valid at the entrance, but later found to be a phony?

Answer: If the bar code had already been scanned, any further attempts to scan the same code should have failed. The fact that it didn't is a mistake. KeyArena administrators do not know how this glitch could have happened.

But it goes to show yet again that ticket scalping, even now that it is legal, is ripe for rip-off.

This kind of mistake happens about once every 10 concerts, said Perry Cooper, spokesman for KeyArena and the Seattle Center. Sometimes it is difficult to determine who would be the valid ticket holder in such cases, so ushers will ask patrons where they bought the ticket. If a patron says the ticket was bought from a scalper, the policy is not to honor the scalped ticket.

The ticket Poffenroth bought was made using Ticketmaster's ticketFast system. These tickets are paid for online, then downloaded in a PDF format and printed from the buyer's computer. The system is "fabulous" for convenience, said Bonnie Poindexter, Ticketmaster spokeswoman. But the company has heard of problems with people buying tickets, then making copies and selling them.

"The only way there could be two tickets with the same unique bar code is if the buyer made a copy," Poindexter said. And a legitimate buyer wouldn't want to make a copy because the copy might put the original ticket in jeopardy.

Each ticket is assigned an individual bar code. KeyArena does not allow re-entry, so once the bar code is scanned at the entrance, it can't be used again. For example, if a scalper buys a ticket, makes copies then sells those tickets, at least one of those tickets will work. Any others will have been canceled.

Whether downloaded or in their traditional card form, tickets also can be invalidated before a performance if they were bought with a stolen credit card. So, a thief could buy a bunch of tickets and sell them right away as real tickets, but they could be rendered worthless before the event.

Poindexter said she did not know how often that happens, but it's a growing problem.

"Buying a ticket in the secondary marketplace is risky," she said.

Neither Poffenroth nor KeyArena nor Ticketmaster knows whether the man sitting in the seat Poffenroth thought he bought was the original buyer, but probably not. There is no way to find out now.

Poffenroth could have approached the man and found out if he, too, had bought from a scalper. He could have taken down the buyer's name and ticket information, too. But he didn't want to make a scene.

"There are so many things I wish I did differently," he said.