Bangalore: Metal music event, Bangalore Open Air-2013 held last Saturday in Jayamahal Palace was attended by hundreds of metal crazy fans and deemed a huge success.It was  advertised as Asia biggest. But when the organisers started checking their accounts, they found that 600 tickets were fake and that has cost them Rs 15 lakh in revenue.

The highlights of the event were Swedish death metal band Dark Tranquillity, Norways black metal composer Ihsahn and progressive metal band Leprous, American instrumental progressive metal band Animals, American power metal band Iced Earth and Germanys old-school thrash metal outfit Sodom.

At least 600 people got to see all these bands almost for free. The miscreants had very cleverly copied the genuine tickets and also the gift voucher for the event. Each ticket for the event was priced at Rs 2,249 for early birds and Rs 2,499 for others.

The organisers are in a state of shock as they are falling short of money to pay for the event. “We have made a loss of Rs 15 lakh and maybe more as we are yet to fully investigate the matter. During the auditing, we found we were falling short of money and it is then we landed on the fake tickets.

Though they were exact copies, on close inspection we found that the font was different on the fake ones,” said Salman Syed, one of the organisers of the event. Inquiries showed that the tickets had been sold for just Rs 1,000. The police are yet to begin investigating.