Last month Fast Company had a piece about how digital ticketing hasn’t really stopped fraud as well as people expected. The article talks about how prior to the NFL going to digital ticketing, a really sophisticated counterfeiter managed to re-create the tickets of many high profile athletic competitions. These counterfeits had the holographic features, heat sensitive ink, and invisible printing that the authentic tickets did.

Once the NFL moved to digital ticketing, the instances of hard ticket counterfeiting nearly disappeared, but it was replaced with other types of fraud involving stolen credit cards, cash app transfers, multi-factor authentication scams. Granted these type of fraud plague other types of transactions than ticket sales.

However, the move to digital means the fraud is able to occur internationally rather than locally and regionally. In a scheme that targeted big tours like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, a couple of people in Kingston, Jamaica working for a Stub Hub contractor were able to divert the delivery of links that allowed access to purchased tickets away from the buyers to their accomplices who would then resell the tickets.

StubHub has since revamped their ticket delivery process and have AI analyzing how tickets are changing hands in order to detect further fraud. Services like Ticketmaster are using digital bar codes and QR codes that change every few seconds to prevent screenshots from scanning as valid

But of course, only the largest venues can afford the technology to read those dynamic codes leaving smaller venues vulnerable to fraudulent ticket use.