Alleging that House of Blues Concerts allowed tickets to their Denver show to fall into the hands of scalpers, Backstreet Boys [ tickets ] are calling on the promotions firm to make a $75,000 donation to a scholarship fund.

The group, which will wrap up the 1999 leg of its ''Millennium'' tour in Florida next week, claims that HOB Concerts (which earlier this year acquired Universal Concerts and their Denver promotion unit) allowed the sale of at least 1,000 prime seats for an Oct. 31 concert at Denver's Pepsi Center to ticket brokers, who in turn sold them for $110 to $350 instead of the $29.50 and $38.50 face values.

Mark Norman, senior vice president of HOB Concerts in Denver, told the Denver Post that a discrepancy netted his company several hundred extra ''house tickets''--promoter or venue allotments, held back from public sale, that the promotions firm normally sells through its own office to clients or to businesses taking large groups. The belated realization that an unusually large number of tickets had to be sold by showtime prompted a decision to loosen the usually strict limits on the number of house tickets any one client or group can purchase.

HOB Concerts admits that tickets fell into the hands of brokers, but not that it knowingly sold the tickets to them. Norman said that the channeling of the tickets to brokers is being investigated.

Backstreet Boys' managers and accountants discovered that fans had bought seats from brokers after they polled the first twenty rows of the Pepsi Center, according to the Post. And when settling accounts after the show, group accountants discovered that House of Blues had increased the price of prime seats by including parking and dinner with them, according to the Rocky Mountain News.

The group's publicist released a statement last Tuesday (11/23) in which the group asked HOB Concerts to donate $75,000 to the Columbine College Fund. The fund provides financial aid to high school students affected by the April 20, 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. HOB Concerts has not said whether it will honor the request.

The Backstreet Boys' statement said that the group was "horrified to learn that [its] fans in Denver were manipulated and ripped off,'' while also portraying the group as a fair-minded act which tries to keep its ticket prices down so that fans can "purchase merchandise and pay for parking plus other concert amenities without completely emptying their pockets."

In the statement, the group proclaimed their support for "publicly-held companies and reputable organizations such as SFX (a national concert promotion conglomerate) and Tickets.com."

According to published reports, the group's management company, The Firm, owns an equity stake in Tickets.com, a national ticketing company which provides auction and, ironically, ticket broker services.

The statement also implies that the group may favor venues aligned with SFX, a rival to HOB Concerts, when tour dates are announced for their February-March U.S. tour in coming weeks.

More concrete is a plan to use Tickets.com's services to auction an expected 1,000 tickets for the upcoming tour, with profits earmarked for as-yet-unnamed charity groups.