How can you stop fake ticket rackets?
- Rajesh Soundararajan
- Aug 20, 2019
- 5 min read
Are your customers subject to fake tickets?
Imagine this situation :
Your customer has seen some eye-popping fares of your airline on the internet for advance booking of tickets for the holiday season six months later. She enthusiastically goes ahead and books the ticket and enthusiastically plans her dream holiday booking hotels and rides and safaris at her destination confident in the knowledge that she has booked the airline tickets months in advance.
She has started long before the travel date getting down to every level of detail trying to make this holiday experience of her lifetime. The last thing she needs is for her plans to get disrupted because the tickets she bought turned out to be fake or even with this happening to other travellers who may have been similarly duped and show up with fake tickets on the eve of the travel, causing a nuisance to those holding genuine tickets by getting into some acrimonious arguments at the ticketing counter.
Now imagine this happening to hundreds of ticket holders and your staff have a tough time trying to address their concerns. Mayhem is certain. The travel agent who sold these tickets worth millions has now taken down the internet website and is absconding. There is nothing that your check-in staff can do then, but as a responsible airline you could have prevented this entire experience.
Ticketing fraud is affecting businesses more than before. It makes genuine customers/travellers suffer. With the rapid development of technology over the last decade, internet scams and ticketing ‘bots’ have increased, engaging in “web touting” to entice customers to buy fake tickets leading to their disappointment and causing chaos in general. This has also left the service provider staff red-faced and the fraudsters pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars each time before they disappear In thin air.
Overview of The Fake Ticketing Problem in the ticketing Industry
Ticketing fraud is estimated to cost the industry millions of dollars worldwide and affect thousands maybe even millions of people. In one of the many such incidents, the police caught the erring travel agents, but such positive resolutions are few and far between.
A simple Google search will throw up hundreds of links like Fake Ticket Generator. People buy tickets and as you would expect this fraud has spread to epidemic proportions with web-based ticketing. It appears that the magnitude of fraud is 200% more prevalent than what existed in physical tickets. The urgency and need for solutions are critical today than at any time in the past.
Challenges for businesses
In the current day and age, you must have your potential customers be able to purchase and verify an online ticket instantly. You cannot curtail your distribution channels to physical counters where you can exercise tighter control. The travellers should be able to trust the ticketing system and have a smooth user-friendly experience during the whole process of purchase, verification and final use
What should your solution look like?
Any solution to tackle this problem should have the following main components
1. You will need a solution that your ticket buyers can trust.
2. It should work for both printed and electronic tickets.
3. Only the authorised issuer/organisation can generate the original tickets, and once generated, such tickets can’t be tampered or modified in an unauthorised manner by anyone else.
4. Allows for easy one-step verification by the ticket buyer.
Enter Secure QR Code - Travel Tickets that stop Ticket Fraud
A solution like a QR code which can be scanned to see the details appears to be a good solution. However a word of caution. The current regular QR Code solutions directly print a QR Code image of what exists on the ticket and this can be easily manipulated to show some other information. They are not secure. What is needed is something which seals the information securely at the time of capture and then can’t be tampered.
Qryptal Secure QR Advantage
Qryptal’s Secure QR Code Ticket generation system helps to address this problem by making sure that all tickets are generated centrally by the authorised issuer and the information on each of them is captured in the form of a Qryptal Secure QR code which is placed on the ticket itself before it gets printed either physically or electronically. Also, the Secure QR code will have the digital signature of the issuing organisation so that unauthorised modifications can be identified and stopped. Such a ticket can be validated easily at various checking points where it is presented, by scanning with an authorised app.
The current process is cumbersome and time-consuming. Today, customers would need to call up the airline and verify the PNR or log in to the website and key in all the details. Using a self-scanning secure QR code mechanism will help the customers to quickly verify the authenticity on demand, without involving any additional resources. In case the QR code is not genuine, the scan will show up the “verification failed” result (as in the image below) which will warn the customer immediately and they can take it up with the agent immediately.
Having this kind of system will ensure that the fake tickets are easily identified and genuine ticket holders can enjoy the event or service for which they have paid, in peace. This will stop revenue leakage and mitigate reputation risk for the organisers. Overall it promises to be a win-win situation for all - the customers, service providers, organisers and artists/players/participants etc.
To learn more about Secure Encrypted QR Code Generation – click here
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