Counterfeit tickets confiscated at arena

~ People were admitted with bogus tickets for seats that didn't exist.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Several University of Illinois basketball fans who thought they had tickets to Wednesday night's game against Southeast Missouri State arrived at the Assembly Hall only to find they had been duped, campus officials said Thursday.

About 10 bogus tickets were confiscated at the arena from people who were trying to find their seats, said Illinois sports information director Kent Brown.

"There was no seat location for the spot listed on the ticket," he said.

The tickets are obviously bogus. The word "Illinois" is misspelled "Illinios" twice and the tickets include a face price of $50.

No ticket for Illinois games at the Assembly Hall has a face value of $50. The price for "Section A" tickets, for which the counterfeits purported to be, is $27, Brown said.

The fake tickets were not caught at the door because ticket takers were trying to move people through quickly. From now on, ticket takers will be asked to increase their scrutiny of tickets, Brown said.

The fans who had bogus tickets did get to see Wednesday's game, but that won't happen again. Anyone with a bogus ticket will be stopped at the door and escorted from the arena, he said.

Wednesday was the first time counterfeit tickets have shown up at the Assembly Hall this season, but it has happened before, Brown said.

Illinois is undefeated through 13 games so demand for tickets will be high during the approaching Big Ten season, increasing the possibility that more bogus tickets will be on the market.

"Fans really need to be on high alert if they're going to be purchasing tickets off the street or online anywhere," Brown said.

Coach Bruce Weber said Thursday that it's flattering to be so popular, but he also urged fans to watch out for con games.

"Obviously I don't want a fan to be out with a bad ticket, so hopefully people will have better awareness and we'll be able to solve the problem," he said.

Some of the tickets found Wednesday appear to have been printed off an Internet site, Illinois assistant police chief Krystal Fitzpatrick said.

"Obviously, we are working on identifying the seller of the tickets and what kind of documents they used to create the bogus tickets," she said.

No one had been arrested.