Crackdown Launched On Counterfeit Tickets, Memorabilia

by Denise Royal | February 2, 2007 at 03:15 am

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Certainly South Florida has Super Bowl fever, and all of the non-stop parties and countless celebrities sightings, there's another phenomenon flooding this area -- crooks. This is a warning about buying and selling fake Super Bowl goods.

As sure as there will be first downs, awesome runs and penalties in the Super Bowl, there will also be fake merchandise, fake T-shirts and phony tickets.

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"Depending on the angel that you look at the hologram, you will see the Super Bowl logo or a decoction of the Vince Lombardi trophy," Anastasia Danias said.

Fake tickets can lead to horror stories, which a Washington, D.C. women can attest to. She used some of her father's retirement funds to purchase what she thought was 12 Super Bowl tickets for $9,000 off the Internet as a great gift for him, but she was scammed.

She told officials that her money went from Washington, D.C., to a bank in Los Angeles and then across the Atlantic Ocean and wound up in Romania.

"The majority of these fraudulent accounts are European," Detective Javier Prellezo said.

Federal and local law enforcement along with the NFL are hot on the case of ticket counterfeiters, NFL officials said at a press conference Thursday.