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Cheap Super Bowl Tickets Could Cost You Embarassment

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By KEITH MORELLI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 23, 2009

If someone offers to sell you a ticket to Super Bowl XLIII on Feb. 1 for just $20 -- no, wait, $15 -- don't fall for it.

First of all, tickets are nowhere near that price; in fact for the first time in Super Bowl history, single-seat tickets are going for $1,000.

Most of the tickets have a face value of $800; an additional 17,000 tickets run $1,000 apiece and are lower level and club seats.

There are also about 1,000 upper-level seats with a face value of $500 apiece.

Even if you find an extra $1,000 in your sock, beware, buyer.

They may look real, feel real, appeal to you as a souvenir as well as a way to get inside the stadium where the privileged 70,000 or so are enjoying the game -- but they're not.

All the game tickets are spoken for, said Tampa police Sgt. Bill Todd. The only ones now available are through secondary markets, like ticket brokers or vendors, many of which are online, he said.

"Be careful," he warns prospective buyers. "'Caveat emptor' is a phrase that has been around for years, and that's for a reason."

The Super Bowl being what it is means there are people out there who "don't mind making you a victim," he said.

And most people coming to the game are from out of town, so if they buy a bogus ticket they are not only out the price of the ticket. They have made a flight here and arranged hotel accommodations for naught, Todd said. And probably they have come with other people as well.

"The number one thing is to be alert, pay attention," he said. "Look at what you're getting. Counterfeit tickets are typically high quality. They have a high quality printing."

To a lot of people, real tickets and fake ones may just about be indistinguishable.

Check the seat locations, he said. Sometimes seats on the phony tickets don't exist in the stadium. And most times, bogus tickets often only have a couple of seat locations, so it is possible that the fake tickets may all have the same seat number.

Counterfeiters "don't spend a lot of money printing separate seat locations on each ticket," he said.

Todd said the most important thing is to deal with someone with whom you have recourse and that means a reputable broker or online ticket vendor.

Stay away from the guy on the street corner, he said. "He's not going to be there five minutes after the sale."

Counterfeit tickets have always been a problem, but technology nowadays has made it more difficult to print up bogus tickets. Holograms on ticket faces and electronic scanning at the gate have reduced the numbers of fake tickets, he said.

"What it did was to get rid of the amateurs," he said. "The counterfeiters out there now are pros."

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