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Posted: October 21, 2008

Fair workers busted on ticket sales scam

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Raleigh, N.C. — Raleigh police charged two people working a ticket booth at the N.C. State Fair with embezzlement Monday.

Travis Baker Rhodes, 87, of 1704 Lorimer Road in Raleigh, and Olivia Lee Jordan, 55, of 2305 Lockwood Folly Lane in Raleigh, were both temporary state employees, working an admission booth for the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which oversees the fair.

Fair spokesman Brian Long described a scam in which one person sold the tickets and the second person palmed them when visitors entered the gates. The tickets were then returned to be sold again, yielding almost $1,000 for the two since last Thursday.

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How much you want to bet they blew nearly all of their score on funnel cakes, corn dogs and fried twinkies? That $ never left the fairgrounds.

Mike D
October 22, 2008 8:07 a.m.

This is very a sad story. I wonder which of the two came up with the crime.

LaLa-Land
October 21, 2008 9:55 p.m.

First impression... I would say a computerized ticket system, with barcode readers, would minimize the possibility of this happening.

But then I took a step back and looked at it logically. How often does this type of ticket crime happen at the Fair? How much do they lose when it happens? Over a 10 year period, how much money is lost? Then... how much would it cost to install a new computerized ticket system, at every gate, that would have to be replaced in 10 years? In this case, it doesn't make sense to defeat the problem. The fix would cost more than the problem!