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SCMP Reporter

THE Urban Council is considering putting holograms on concert tickets to cut down on counterfeiting.

  An URBTIX spokesman confirmed last night the council was working with its printing contractor on several options designed to stem the rising number of fake tickets.

  Police estimate that about 1,000 bogus tickets were in circulation for a recent Jacky Cheung concert while 238 fake tickets were seized before a Leon Lai concert in August.

  ''There are two aspects which we are concentrating on in a bid to prevent the production, sale and use of counterfeit tickets,'' the spokesman said.

  ''The first aspect is straightforward and involves training our staff to ensure fake tickets are spotted before being used to gain entry to an event.

       ''When fakes are compared with genuine tickets it is easy to see the differences. Up till now, counterfeit tickets have been of inferior quality.''    The second aspect - making sure the public is buying the real thing - was more difficult because a potential buyer would not have a genuine ticket for comparison.

  ''One option being considered is to feature a complex high-quality design on the tickets which will make them virtually impossible to copy without the original artwork.

  ''Putting holograms on tickets is also a possibility but we have to consider that, even if our tickets feature high-quality holograms, a counterfeiter can still fool a member of the public by using a ticket with an inferior hologram. We are still weighing up our options in terms of effectiveness and expense but we aren't ruling anything out.'' 



Hologram ticket plan