Card, mobile credential, payment and security
For students at the University of California, Santa Barbara tickets to the university's recent Extravaganza music festival were, quite literally, a hot-ticket item. So much so that some students were renting out or selling their student IDs -- on which the event tickets were provisioned -- to other students and individuals not connected to the university.
Extravaganza is an annual free campus music festival held on the UCSB campus. The event draws thousands of students every year, and is only open to UCSB students. According to a report from the Daily Nexus, several students were referred to UCSB’s Office of Judicial Affairs for trying to rent or sell their IDs to non-UCSB students.
Simple searches on Facebook were returning as many as 40 posts either seeking or wishing to sell a student ID card in the run up to the event. Students looking to make a quick buck were posting their IDs on Facebook, with offers rolling in for anywhere from $20 to $50.
The event is funded and hosted by the university's Associated Students Program Board. Professional security was hired for the event and instructed to examine student ID cards. Instructions for ID verification included ensuring that faces matched the picture on the cards, and that the ID photos were not scratched out to the point that they were unrecognizable.
University officials had seen this problem in years past, but the volume of students selling IDs on social media was significant for this year's event. The Associated Students Program Board does have ID card scanners, but it is unclear whether the group used the scanners at the gate. UCSB's dean of student life, says that students who were flagged for selling their ID card had to, at the very least, speak with a university administrator.
