With the NCAA Tournament under way, consumer advocates are advising students to be wary customers when purchasing tickets.

"College students are very budget-conscious, and they want to find the best deals. These kids love their teams, and they're willing to do just about anything to see them play," said Eric Baker, a sports-ticketing expert and president of StubHub.com.

"The scammers are going to try and take advantage of the passion of the fans."

StubHub.com is a Web site where people can buy or sell numerous event tickets, from the NCAA Championship game to the United States Grand Prix to the Vail Film Festival.

The site doesn't act as a ticket broker, though. A third party, typically a season-ticket holder, actually sells the tickets and must register with the site by providing his or her personal information. StubHub guarantees delivery to the buyer, a StubHub spokesman said. He said in the unlikely event that a seller cheats a buyer out of their tickets, StubHub will use the seller's account to purchase comparable tickets for the buyer.

Baker, who has been in the secondary-ticketing business for almost three years, said it's very easy for fans to get scammed. He said events like the Super Bowl and the NCAA Tournament provide perfect opportunities for ticket scammers. Scams were prevalent during the NFL Conference Playoffs in January, Baker said. One such case occurred during the NFC Championship Game.

In the scheme, scammers posed as police officers approached fans at random and asked to see their tickets. After the fans obliged, the masquerading officers would inform them their tickets were counterfeit and had to be confiscated. The "officers" would then walk away with legitimate tickets to the game.

"When you go down to the arena to try and get tickets, you're dealing with people you don't know," Baker said. "The guarantee is only as good as the guarantor."

Fred Hoffecker, president of the Better Business Bureau of Detroit and Eastern Michigan, said the bureau doesn't get a lot of complaints of ticket scams.

"People are either avoiding problems or they're not reporting them," he said. Because of this, the bureau doesn't have statistics on the number of people scammed each year or how much money they lose in scams.

Also, sites that try to perpetrate a fraud are quick to pop up and quick to disappear, Hoffecker said.

"There isn't a www.fraud.com, so the scams are hard to track," he said.

Some MSU students say they're wary of using the Web to purchase tickets.

Morris Holmes, a telecommunication, information studies and media junior, said he prefers to purchase tickets from friends.

"I buy them off people that I know because they're easy to get and I don't have to worry about scams," Holmes said.