Unfortunately human beings are resourceful creatures and as owners and exhibitors it is easy to forget that the current generation of patrons, managers and sellers have been involved with this technology intimately and also have access to facilities thought impossible years ago. It is therefore a naive comment to say that the installation of a computer system in a theatre solves matters involving fraud. This is similar to saying that you have invented a better mouse trap.
The two basic areas of fraud are external, that is, patrons finding ways to bypass paying for entry or seeing different movies to those which they requested and secondly internal fraud by staff and management. Actually there is a third. This is where collusion occurs between staff and the patrons to fraud the business, for example, letting your friends in on passes.
Now short of installing airport security systems in theatres (which we know really don't do a great deal anyway) the monitoring of patron entry is determined by a couple of factors. Most important is the ticket. A computer system prevents fraud by printing a ticket at the time of sale but if the usher has to decipher a tiny ticket full of numbers, useless facts and other nondescript data then very quickly they will become bored and just let everyone in. It is very important therefore to have something large and intimidating on the ticket which will retain the attention span of the usher long enough to register if it is a valid ticket. Having different colored blank stock was long considered a good way to prevent illegal copying of tickets but how hard is it to find a color copier these days? In short only staff vigilance can monitor this type of fraud.
What is believed to be the largest fraud is the so called inside job. Staff and/or management conspiring to skim money out of the system. Now this has been going on for years with only the level of sophistication and creativity changing. What is often forgotten by exhibitors when choosing their ticketing systems is that any number of staff in their employ will already have a very good familiarity with the workings of the hardware and software. This is particularly true of a lot of products which run under Microsoft Windows or one of its many, many derivatives. Since the operating system has more holes in it than a piece of swiss cheese, it provides numerous loopholes for clever staff to log miscellaneous credits, edit data files or even falsify records which are totally transparent to the owner.
Exhibitors should also be aware that many of these systems were written using generic databases such as Access and Paradox which have been around for many years and are often used in schools and universities alike to train our future computer specialists. As a result there are more utilities and hacking tools freely available than there are actual programs available for these systems. It therefore becomes very easy for someone with a little knowledge to go a long way.
Now that we have convinced you not to hire a computer genius let us say that without adequate monitoring at the head office as well, a manager and/or their staff could simply just take the money. After all, that's what computers are for aren't they? Who actually reads their reports and how timely and accurate is the information that is provided.
Since this is not a users guide for ripping off theatres I will not elaborate further. The purpose of this was simply to let potential customers of ours know what we know and that our experience allows us to have a system based on Brie rather than swiss cheese. As a result we have an excellent mouse trap already built in.