Xclusive still in business online

6/2/2011

Terence Shepherd, his wife, and three other alleged ticket scammers are presently on trial in Southwark Crown Court in London for ticket fraud and related offenses. Longtime Shepherd associate Allan Schaverien has already entered a guilty plea and is awaiting sentencing. Shepherd and two other defendants, Alan Scott and Geert Van Meel, were found personally liable for the Olympic ticket losses in a trial last year brought by merchant bankers who had been left holding the bag when the Olympic scheme collapsed.

The present criminal court trial covers crimes committed between April 2007 and April 2009 including the Beijing Olympic ticket scam. It may surprise the court and others to know that websites related to Xclusive, TheOnlineTicketExchange.com, and other alleged Shepherd enterprises still offer tickets on the Internet today.

The Shepherd network and ones like it set up arrays of interrelated and cross-connected websites and corporations that drive internet traffic to their current ticket sales sites and allow for a quick digital getaway when law enforcement closes in. This interconnectedness is incredibly valuable to scammers, but those same connections leave a digital trail that ties these sites together and proves that they are related.

The domain name Gigsport.com was first registered by known Shepherd entity TheOnlineTicketExchange.com in September, 2009. Since then, it has passed through a number of registrants, including its own, GigSport.com Ltd., and its most recent registrant, Tickets2AllEvents Limited.

The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau arrested four directors or former directors of GigSport.com on August 12, 2010. GigSport shut down its website on March 28, 2011 as customers received their GigSport insolvency notices. Xclusive/OTE/GigSport took out a new company name and domain (Tickets2AllEvents.com) in August 2010, less than two weeks after the GigSport Four were arrested. The GigSport.com website was back up by April 4, 2011 with new content and a new owner, J Granger of Tickets2AllEvents. Remember that the original secretary for GigSport was Caroline Louise Granger. Tickets2AllEvents.com was registered on August 24, 2010 to GigSport. It changed to its own registry on January 25, 2011. GigSport, which used to be fed by links from Shepherd's Theonlineticketshop.com until that site was shut down, is still supported by links from many other related sites today.

Here is a fine example of another Xclusive site that has passed through numerous Shepherd-related entities only to end up with John William Granger's Tickets2 All Events, LTD: britishopenticketmaster.com

July 3, 2007: Taken out and registered by XLH (Xclusive Leisure and Hospitality) July 3, 2007

October 5, 2008: Somewhere between June and early October 2008, the domain was transferred to TheOnlineTicketExchange.com

January 13, 2010: Between late November and mid-January 2010, the domain was transferred to Ace Tickets, Ltd.

January 21, 2010: The registration was moved quickly to BuyMyTickets, although the contact phone number remained the same as before.

December 17, 2010: Between the end of October and mid-December 2010, the domain changed ownership again. This time the registrant is GigSports.com [sic]. The street address is the same one used for the Ace Ticket registrant (99 Middlesex Street   LONDON, GB E1 7DA,   GB).

April 5, 2011: Between February 10 and April 5, 2011 the domain was transferred from GigSport.com to John Granger's Tickets2AllEvents Limited.

The website britishopenticketmaster.com is still up and operating today, although it appears only to be a link feeder site to gigsport.com and their Tickets2AllEvents Limited ticket sale pages. It no longer sells tickets directly. The British Open tickets they offer are dated 2007. Former XLH and GigSports.com site mygenesistickets.com is now owned by Tickets2AllEvents and used the same way today.

For a detailed timeline of the facts and dates of the London ticket scammers since 2002, click here.