Denver area cinema operators beware. Last night on the radio the deejays were doing a segment on creative ways to score a deal. One gentleman in his late 20s called in and revealed how he hasn’t paid for a full price, adult ticket in years. In a nutshell, he has been defrauding cinemas of revenue using a simple, yet very effective scheme.

Here’s the scheme as the caller explained it on the radio:

You go to a movie theater that has self service ticket kiosks and instead of buying a regular, adult ticket you buy a senior price ticket, often at half the price of an adult ticket. Then enjoy the movie at a major discount.

This scheme works for two reasons.

1. The caller has no moral issue buying a senior ticket. He admits it’s wrong but does it anyway.
2. The employee does not stop the fraud.

When the deejays pressed him for how he gets away with this, the caller says that he knows the minimum wage employee collecting tickets does not care that he has the wrong ticket type. The employee just wants to collect a paycheck and go home. Therefore, the caller said no one has ever stopped, or even questioned, him using a senior ticket

Fortunately, cinemas can limit loss due to this type of fraud with MVaaS. Leveraging Envysion’s powerful reporting capabilities, a cinema operator can easily identify all senior ticket sales at the kiosk register and review the video of those transactions to quickly determine if customers are taking advantage of the senior discount. (The cinema operator might also consider running a report for student tickets too.)

Once the extent of the fraud is determined, it is essential to communicate to employees the seriousness of this type of fraud. Short of limiting the types of tickets sold at kiosk registers, cinema operators must rely on their employees to catch and stop the fraud. Again cinema operators can leverage MVaaS to help ensure, employees are guarding against this type of fraud. If employees are catching and stopping the inappropriate tickets, then cinema operators can expect an certain number of ticket exchanges, i.e., if 10 customers inappropriately purchase a senior ticket in one day, then there should be 10 senior tickets exchanged for full price adult tickets during the same day. Using Envysion’s MVaaS a cinema operator is able to determine the number of senior tickets sold at the kiosk, visually identify any inappropriate sales and compare the number of inappropriate sales with the number of tickets exchanged – all within a matter of minutes.