Each time the Leafs or Raptors play a home game, security turns away roughly a dozen customers holding bogus tickets they’ve printed off at home.

It’s often not their fault, but it’s a problem.

Now Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment has announced it is moving toward paperless ticketing by phasing out the print-at-home option for Leafs and Raptors tickets, a move that will help streamline the reselling process and root out fraud.

MLSE says fans sometimes buy tickets from secondary sellers and then print them out, not knowing they’ve been duplicated elsewhere. When multiple people try to attend a game with self-printed tickets bearing the same barcode, confusion ensues, as staff and customers try to determine who actually owns the seats.

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Starting this fall, only two options will remain for Raptors and Leafs games: mobile electronic tickets, or tickets printed on cardboard stock. Toronto FC will extend the print-at-home option through the end of this season before expanding its mobile ticketing program in 2019, said MLSE chief commercial officer Dave Hopkinson.

Moving to mobile, he said, will make counterfeiting tickets nearly impossible.

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“We’re seeing more than 10 ejections and rejections a night … and these are the (counterfeit tickets) we know about,” Hopkinson said. “It’s overwhelmingly people who have been duped. Those are real tears.”

Hopkinson said all of MLSE’s sports teams will likely move to completely paperless ticketing by 2020. Elsewhere, other pro sports outfits have already made the switch. The Montreal Canadiens charge a fee to print tickets on stock, but otherwise use mobile device tickets. This season, the Los Angeles Kings also moved to a paper-free ticket platform.

Last fall the NFL and Ticketmaster entered a multi-year deal to convert the league to a digital ticketing program.

“This partnership lays the groundwork for where the ticketing industry can go,” said Jared Smith, president of Ticketmaster North America, in a statement released when the deal was finalized in October. “We’re actively building both our business model and our technology to empower content owners to operate in a new way.”

On Tuesday, ESPN reported that the Dallas Cowboys had opted out of the league deal, to sign an agreement with reselling platform SeatGeek.

Major League Soccer’s Orlando City SC switched to digital tickets this season, and reported a sharp decrease in cases of ticket fraud.

“We have a very tech-savvy fan base,” said Orlando’s chief revenue officer, Chris Gallagher, in an interview with SportTechie. “We needed to have a mobile solution that we felt comfortable in promoting to that type of fan base.”

Hopkinson says MLSE has spent the past 18 months studying its season-ticket holder database, aiming to learn which customers are professional ticket resellers. He said the move to mobile ticketing will allow the team to track more easily which reselling platforms season ticket holders are using, and yield a better idea of which users might be violating the ticket buyers’ code of conduct.

“With mobile, you can follow the chain of legal ownership,” Hopkinson said. “It’s not perfect, but it gets better every day.”

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Last year the Blue Jays partnered with secondary sales platform StubHub, citing a similar desire to make selling and transferring tickets simpler and less prone to fraud. StubHub spokesperson Cameron Papp applauds teams and leagues working to stop ticket fraud, but worries they might suppress the effortless transfer of tickets that companies like StubHub facilitate.

“Counterfeit tickets are virtually a non-issue (with paperless ticketing),” Papp said. “We support any technology that improves the fan experience … But we don’t support it when mobile entry is introduced to curb secondary activity. Fans should have the right to freely transfer their tickets at any point of sale.”

In 2015, StubHub filed an antitrust suit against the Golden State Warriors and Ticketmaster, arguing the companies’ partnership cost StubHub customers. StubHub claimed the number of Warriors tickets listed on its platform declined 80 per cent after the team enlisted Ticketmaster as its official reselling partner.

A judge dismissed the suit in November 2015.

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