ATLANTA — The Atlanta Falcons are alerting fans to be wary of counterfeit tickets being sold on line and on the street for the big NFC Divisional Playoff game Saturday.
The 70,000-seat dome is sold out for Saturday’s playoff game, so the only way you get a ticket is to buy on the resale market or from scalpers.
Team officials say if you're buying resale tickets, go to a trusted source so you don’t spend a lot of money on a worthless ticket.
“It's a very real scenario, and the bigger the game, the more problematic it is,” said Don Rovak, the Falcons VP of Ticket Sales.
Rovak told Channel 2’s Tom Regan that playoff tickets are printed with embossing and other features that are tough to duplicate, but the counterfeiters are getting very creative.
“Some look perfect. We say this person took a lot of work to create a fraudulent ticket,” Rovak said.
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Even a ticket that was once legitimate could be useless if the bar code was electronically transferred to a mobile device.
“You have someone looking at this ticket on the street and it may not be valid at all,” Rovak said.
Rovak told Regan pdf ticketing printing is also very susceptible to fraud.
“You could print off a PDF 25 times and sell it on the street for a game like this, $200 or $300 each,” he said.
He says at a playoff game easily well over a hundred fans will wind up with counterfeit or bogus tickets, and they often end up talking to him.
“I’m going to be talking to a family, like I do at every big game, that spent $1,300 for four seat, trying to help them, but I won't,” he said.
He says fan should buy resale tickets from the Falcons’ website, ticket exchange or Ticketmaster.
Resale tickets are priced from around $130 for upper level seats to over $1,000 for field level seats.
Three of the 12 suites are still available for $7,000 to $11,000 each.