Viagogo found that more than 67,000 fake music festival tickets were sold last year. In 2011, that number could reach 100,000. Most of this scamming occurs during the summer, the most popular season for concerts.

Ticket scams have been occurring for years. When a ticket is nothing but a piece of paper with a barcode that is scanned at the gate, counterfeiting is child’s play. Some events provide wristbands to ticketed attendees, and these wristbands can also be easily faked.

Watermarks and other security features make tickets a bit more difficult to recreate, but these low-tech methods of determining a ticket’s authenticity are often lost on the general public. The victim only realizes the scam when he’s denied entry to an event.

Avoid scalpers, period. Unless you know them personally, just buy tickets at the venue’s window. When purchasing tickets online, stick to legitimate websites. An online search will probably turn up plenty of options, but only buy from familiar, trusted brokers.

Scam artists often take advantage of online ticket companies by buying up blocks of tickets with stolen credit cards, either to counterfeit or simply to overcharge the public.

Fortunately, some online ticketing companies have deployed device reputation, which allows them to uncover computers or other devices responsible for fraudulent activity or exhibiting suspicious behavior at the time of sale, and deny transactions from these devices. This kind of visibility gives ticket services businesses a powerful advantage. More than ever, they can easily identify the scam artists and where they’re coming from.

Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation, discusses yet another data breach on Good Morning America. (Disclosures)

In order to shed more light on the trends in virtual goods purchasing, market researcher VGMarket, along with Playspan, conducted a survey in July of this year, asking players what kinds of virtual goods they were buying and in what kind of games. The findings of the survey, summarized in a recent article posted on VentureBeat, show that over half of all virtual goods transactions occur in free-to-play games.

In the past year, 58% of the players in free games made purchases of virtual goods, on average making 12 separate purchases over the course of a year, with a median total expenditure of $75. By comparison, in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, 34% of players purchased virtual goods, for a median expenditure of $60 over the course of a year.

These numbers support the trend of an increasingly popular business model in the online games industry, based around micro-transactions and the sale of virtual goods. Given the success of this model so far, likely, we will continue to see an increase in both the number of free online games and the amount of virtual goods being purchased. However, there is a downside. Like any venture involving online payments, fraud has to be a concern. Stolen credit cards are used to make all kinds of purchases, including the purchase of virtual goods.

And while you might assume that the theft of virtual goods wouldn’t have a noticeable financial impact—unfortunately, it can. Despite the fact that virtual goods may be nearly free to produce, the revenue from these in-game additions often ends up subsidizing the entire cost of producing and hosting free games, which can be significant. Also, high fraud rates drive up the cost of payment options and, if severe enough, can limit the type of payments a business can accept, in turn causing a decline in overall purchases.

In the ongoing conversations we have with our online gaming customers, the toughest part of dealing with fraud, especially as it relates to the purchase of virtual goods, is catching repeat offenders and those fraudsters that are working together. Because while fraud teams can ban a single account once it has been identified as fraudulent, it is really the individual behind the account who needs to be stopped.

Device recognition, coupled with device reputation, however, provides a valuable solution to this problem by identifying the computer, and thus the individual, behind a bad account. With the additional ability to see into relationships between individual computers and accounts, fraud rings and other organized crime can more easily be identified and stopped. This innovative approach to fraud management is something for current and emerging gaming companies to consider: as the trend in favor of virtual goods continues, how best to protect against the fraud that will inevitably follow?

The reality in the online games environment is that even many of the best anti-fraud tools simply don’t provide effective results. Time and again we at iovation have seen significant uplift over existing tools to reduce fraud for our customers in the MMO industry: in the case of BattleClinic, as dramatic as a 95% reduction. What seems to be particularly compelling about theresults we’ve seen in this industry is our ability to quickly establish the relationships between player accounts that were previously hidden. Not only does this result in dramatic reduction in fraud, it also significantly reduces the amount of time spent on trying to manually search for associations and patterns in personal data.

iovation is committed to the gaming industry and frequently attends and presents at gaming conferences. We will be at both the Casual Connect Seattle conference, July 21-23, and the Austin GDC conference, Sept 15-18, if you would like to meet with us in person.