Cops crack down on used theme park ticket sales

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) - They're practically on every street corner in the tourist corridor.

Booths with discounted park tickets that don't require you to go on a timeshare tour to get the savings. Well, it's time to warn your vacationing friends and family: beware of the bait. The person selling those tickets might be charged with breaking the law.

Take Donna Bosse for example. Detectives from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office say Bosse has been selling used theme park tickets inside an upscale gas station near Sea World.

“So who hires you?” FOX 35 Reporter David Martin asks. “I have nothing to say,” Bosse replies, as she stand in handcuffs. “How much money do you make doing this?” Martin continues. “I really don't want to talk about it,” Bosse answers.

She doesn't want to talk about it because what she's accused of doing is a felony. That's why she's in handcuffs. That's why she was taken to jail, charged with Scheme to Defraud and Resale of Multiday Tickets.

“This ticket can't go to your neighbor. It can't go to some complete stranger,” says Detective Terri Massaro of Orange County.

But that's exactly how this crime ring makes money. And why the Orange County Sheriff's Office is cracking down on the growing problem near the theme parks.

“When the theme parks realized how out of hand this has gotten, they've stopped helping the tourists who've bought the bad tickets. Because they're losing too much money,” Massaro says.

Here's how the scheme works. The shady merchants advertise discounted park tickets without having to take a 2-hour timeshare tour. “But to avoid the tour, you're actually buying used tickets,” warns Massaro. And that's illegal.

The street corner merchants buy used multi-day tickets from tourists for anywhere between $20 and $50 a ticket. Easy cash for the unsuspecting vacationer.

The merchants then apply chemicals to the used tickets. “They will remove the signature and they will remove the printed name,” says Massaro.

They then turn around and sell it discounted to a new tourist, who can use the remaining days on it.

Often, the merchants tell the tourists to stop at the park ticket booth and load up additional days on that same ticket. It's very cheap to add days to a multi-day ticket and the parks won't blink at it.

“Because there really isn't anything unusual about you coming here on vacation with your family and deciding 'I'm going to stay another seven days,'” adds Massaro.

That ticket then gets brought back to the corner store, the tourist gets paid some cash for his hard work, and the booth turns around and sells those cheap days at a substantial profit.

Over and over again. Each ticket, logged carefully in notebooks.

But sometimes, the tourist winds up with a multi-day ticket with no days on it, and no agreement to add more days to it.

“If they get to the turnstile with a ticket that has no days left on it, you've got a family out of $500 or so, depending on what they bought the tickets for. None of these theme parks will reimburse them because they did not purchase these tickets at a legitimate theme park booth,” says Massaro.

And the tourist, who just got suckered, will not likely go back to the bad guys for help.

“Mostly they just walk away because they don’t want to go back and do the confrontation,” submits Massaro.

Orange County suspects at least 20 ticket booths in the area are active in a big crime ring, led by one very wealthy man. Detectives won't tell us who he is yet. But they've got him in their sites.

“He's made it clear that because of the money he makes from this, he's not going to stop. It's nothing for him to go to jail and bond out his employees and put them back in the booths again,” says Massaro.

But authorities are stepping up their game. On the day Bosse was arrested, so was another booth operator: Casey Brown. Detectives say they don't arrest tourists in this operation because the majority don't even realize they're involved in a criminal enterprise.

By the way, legitimate timeshare tours offer vouchers for free or discounted tickets.