Working the Web: Following Internet Traces to Find Olympics Scammers

8/22/2008

One thing you can say about Muhammad Ali Nasir is that he seems to be good at his job. According to his on-line resume, since 2006 Nasir has worked as a web expert for companies run by suspected Olympics ticket scammer Terence Shepherd, and during that period, as he used to boast on his now empty personal website, he accomplished a lot for the man thought to have raked in millions of dollars while depriving thousands of people of their chance to attend Olympic events.

The Olympics scammers may have been accused of criminal activity, but what they haven’t been accused of is producing bad websites. On the contrary, the ticketing websites created by the scammers have been deemed far superior to the ticketing websites created by the Olympics official ticketing firm. (For more on this, see the 8.19.08 update “Inferior Official Site Paved the Way for Scammers.”) And if Nasir is to be believed, he’s responsible for much of that. He lists among his “major achievements” such things as improving the Google rankings for Shepherd’s sites, creating a social network of blogs about the sites, increasing the in-bound links for the sites, and, ultimately, helping with a 300% increase in sales.

Nasir’s on-line post says he did all this for TheOnlineTicketShop.com, and not the now notorious beijingticketing.com, the best known of the Olympics ticketing scam websites. But since both websites trace back to Terence Shepherd, and in other postings Nasir identifies himself as working for Xclusive Leisure & Hospitality LTD, the parent of beijingticketing.com, the difference is likely moot. TheOnlineTicketShop.com has itself been accused of doing the same thing as beijingticketing.com — selling tickets that never showed up, and likely never existed. So whether he worked directly on the scam Olympics site, or whether the expertise he developed on other Shepherd sites was used for the Olympics one, it seems likely that some of the site’s success in deceiving ticket buyers can be attributed to Nasir.

At the very least, Nasir appears to have been in a position to know the inner workings of Shepherd’s operations, something that could be important to authorities as they attempt to track down the man thought at the center of the ticketing scam. While Shepherd himself may have relocated to Barbados — or perhaps Miami, according to one report — and be hard to locate, Nasir could be easier to find. Over the last few years he has spread a considerable amount of information about himself across the internet, and while much of that information has been disappearing in recent weeks, cached versions of the sites he used still exist, leaving behind details of his personal history and names of people who may know where he is, and what he’s up to.

A saved copy of Nasir’s Facebook listing, for example, has the names of a number of claimed friends. A cached copy of the home page of Global Marketing Agency, the company Nasir claims to have moved to in June, provides some contact information for him, information that may or may not be out of date. And a page rescued from his now-empty personal website tells of his personal history — how he was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and raised in Lahore before moving to England and studying internet engineering at the University of East London; how art has been his passion since childhood; how he has worked on all phases of the software development life cycle; and how “I got more focused on Search Engine Optimization and Marketing analysis of websites and… [how] to achieve high ranking on Google, Yahoo, MSN and major search engines.” That last bit is of particular interest, given that achieving a high ranking on trusted internet search engines is one of the ways the scam Olympic ticketing websites helped convince people they were legitimate.

Other elements of how the scam sites operated can be found in articles Nasir posted to e-zines. In one, “Dilemma of Buying Tickets Online,” which ironically is about how to avoid being scammed by ticketing websites, he suggests people read “fans review about the ticket brokers.” One of the alleged tricks pulled by beijingticketing.com was to post glowing reviews about itself on sites where people came in search of reliable information on ticket brokers. The reviews were never identified as coming from beijingticketing.com, but instead attributed to regular ticket buyers. In another e-zine article, this one titled “SEO In House Checklist & Recommendation,” Nasir outlined just what someone needed to do in order to have their website beat out other sites, including using “social networking” — making it easy for visitors to your site to recommend it to others — as a key technique to get fast results. It was a technique used to great advantage by beijingticketing.com, and one completely ignored by the Olympics official ticketing website.

Having expertise when it comes to internet marketing is not, of course, a bad thing. And it’s likely the Olympics official ticketing website would have profited from having someone of Nasir’s abilities. But if Nasir’s skills were used to help dash the dreams of ticket buyers hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime Olympics experience, then that is a bad thing. Using the clues he has left scattered across the World Wide Web to find him, and then having him help track down the others behind the Olympics ticketing scam, would seem to be an appropriate way to begin to offer some small recompense.