Large events, be they sports events like football matches, rock shows or trade exhibitions are always a challenge to manage. The challenges arise from the fact that the organizers are trying to control, not just ordinary crowds of people, but large fanatical crowds (like football fans). Restricting entry to only genuine ticket or pass holders is a major headache.

There have been many cases of fraudulent tickets (duplicate numbers, counterfeit tickets) being sold to an unsuspecting and eager public. These cases not only give heartburn to the person who has been cheated out of his money, but also create ugly scenes at the venue, where the organizers have to inform the victim, near the entrance to the grand show, that all along, he has been misled and sorry, he cannot enter, because he is holding a dud ticket.

Thus the problems with the present situation are:

1.  If the ticket is just a printed ticket, then the entry to the event has to be manually regulated, where each person’s ticket is checked by a security guard and then
2. allowed entry. It requires a large number of guards who have angry and impatient fans breathing down their neck.
3.  If the ticket is just a printed piece of paper, it can be easily counterfeited. Worse, if the organizers themselves cannot make out the difference between a genuine
4. and a counterfeit, then a genuine visitor who has purchased the official ticket may find his seat occupied by a fake ticket holder, who merely arrived earlier.
5. To make matters better, organizers introduced bar coded tickets. Now due to the automatic identification, the process of gatekeeping was faster, but alas, bar codes could also be easily counterfeited. So we are back to square one.