Things were going superbly for Don and Kathy Zimmer last weekend as they nestled into their seats at the Georgia Dome to watch Final Four basketball action. The Lawrence couple had dynamite seats, 11 rows from the action.

Then, about 30 minutes before tip-off, a second couple showed with tickets for the exact same spots.

Before security officers could sort out the double-trouble, a third couple arrived. They also had tickets for the same swell seats.

Zimmer, who runs Kanza Properties, had purchased counterfeit tickets from a scalper. The bogus tickets were so good complete with lamination, bar codes and hologram that they fooled the NCAA’s automated ticket scanners.

At ground zero of college basketball, Zimmer had been bamboozled by professionals.

“I’m kind of amazed at the quality of these (bogus) tickets,” he said.

Zimmer said he paid so much for the tickets he’s embarrassed to reveal the price even to his wife. He said he’s afraid to tell her how much he paid and she’s afraid to ask.

“She hasn’t asked me and I haven’t told her,” he said.

Zimmer said before the fraud was detected a ticket broker had offered him $500 more than he paid for the tickets. The couple rejected the offer because they were more interested in seeing the Jayhawks play than they were in making a profit.

Zimmer said the bogus tickets were good enough to deceive the electronic scanners and were good enough to fool the eye. They were identical in nearly all respects to the real thing. The paper was the right thickness and size. Printing colors appeared in order. So did the text. The hologram on each ticket looked official.

The catch, Zimmer said, turned out to be numbers associated with the bar code. While the coding was good enough to get them in the dome, closer inspection revealed four of the six tickets had identical numbers. The real tickets had numbers in sequence.

Greg Shaheen, the NCAA’s managing director of the Division I men’s basketball championship, said Friday he had received only five reports of fraudulent tickets among the 53,000 sold at the Final Four.

“It’s unfortunate,” he said, “but by every means possible we communicate that the buyer has to beware.”

In response to telephone calls and e-mails received at the NCAA’s offices in Indianapolis throughout the year, association staffers tell people that Final Four tickets should be considered authentic only if purchased directly from the NCAA or one of the four universities to make it to the Final Four.

Furthermore, Shaheen said, people selling Final Four tickets should think twice. It was illegal to sell game tickets within a half mile of the Georgia Dome. Local police and NCAA officials keep an eye open for scalpers at tournament sites. If the NCAA can prove the original holder of tournament tickets sold any or all of them, the seller’s right to buy tickets from the NCAA can be suspended for five years.

As it turned out, the Zimmers saw the game after all.

“Lucky for us,” Zimmer said. “another KU couple had two extra tickets and we were able to buy those.”

Those tickets were legitimate but they were seven rows from the top of the four-decked dome.

“We we’re looking down at the scoreboard,” he said. “The only way we could follow the action was to look at the color of uniforms.”