Olympics Ticketing Scams: The English Connection

9/3/2008

Disappointed visitors to the Beijing Olympics may have been shocked to discover that the websites they depended on for events tickets, websites that left them hanging when the promised tickets never arrived, were run by alleged scam artists. It’s unlikely, however, that the authorities in England were equally surprised, especially when the name Terence Shepherd came out. Shepherd’s is a name that English officials have heard before, specifically in relation to ticketing scams that followed almost exactly the pattern found in the 2008 Games.

That pattern is simple: find an event people are eager to attend, create a company with an official looking website that promises to supply hard to find tickets, push the arrival date for those tickets to just before the event begins, then never deliver the tickets. By the time people realize they’ve been taken advantage of, the company has gone into receivership, the people behind it have slipped away, and there are no funds available to reimburse anyone for their purchases, much less compensate them for the frustrations and distress they’ve suffered.

That pretty much explains what happened to the people who depended on beijingticketing.com, one of many websites connected to Shepherd, for their Olympics tickets. But it also explains what happened to people who depended on Sports Mondial, another Shepherd connected ticketing firm, and to theonlineticketshop.com, yet another Shepherd related ticketing site. Sports Mondial went under in 2004 owing nearly £2.4 million. The Online Ticket Shop collapsed two years later, with debts of some £1.1 million. If early estimates of the amount lost by those victimized in Olympics ticketing scams are even close to accurate — one suggested it could be in excess of $45 million, or £23.5 million — then those previous failures will seem negligible in comparison to the failure of Xclusive Tickets Ltd. and Xclusive Leisure & Hospitality Ltd., the companies behind beijingticketing.com that just recently went into liquidation. But if Xclusive Tickets Ltd. and Xclusive Leisure & Hospitality Ltd. raised the bar for ticket scammers, there’s no question they followed in the footsteps laid down by Sports Mondial and The Online Ticket Shop. And given how familiar those footsteps were, the question is why authorities didn’t recognize them and stop the Olympics ticketing scams before they got started.

One reason may be that Shepherd’s ticketing sites, while among the best known, are hardly the only questionable online ticketing operations in England. Indeed, while ticket resellers, scalpers, and touts are common in most countries, they seem to be particularly well established in the United Kingdom. As Patrick Collinson, a writer for London’s The Guardian, noted recently, in the United Kingdom, ticket scamming is “reaching epidemic levels.” And what are authorities doing? In Collinson’s words, “Almost zilch.”

Almost zilch is also a good description of the official reaction to earlier ticketing scams allegedly related to Shepherd. Sports Mondial got into trouble for failing to deliver tickets to Rugby World Cup matches in 2003, but despite investigations by rugby union officials and Britain’s Football Association all that happened is that Sports Mondial disappeared, to be replaced by The Online Ticket Shop. The director of one events company in Australia reported having to mortgage his house to replace tickets that Sports Mondial never produced, while Shepherd lived nicely in a comfortable southeast London home worth in excess of £1 million. Meanwhile, The Online Ticket Shop went on to get in trouble for, among other things, failing to deliver tickets it had sold to the 2007 Champions League Final in Paris and to World Cup matches that same year. Again, despite complaints and the loss of many thousands of dollars, all that happened is that The Online Ticket Shop went into receivership, where it was bought for a song by a company called Xclusiveticket.com — which is basically the same as Xclusive Tickets Ltd. and Xclusive Leisure & Hospitality Ltd., the Shepherd connected firms that went on to disappoint so many hopeful Olympics ticket buyers.

Though English newspapers had little trouble tracking Shepherd down — at least before he allegedly disappeared to Barbados and then perhaps to Miami — English authorities exhibited little interest in him. One possible reason, according to a private investigator who has been looking into Shepherd’s activities for years, is that he has managed to keep himself at arms length from the companies he’s connected to, never putting his name on their lists of directors. But at the same time, the people whose names are on those lists don’t seem to have come under much official scrutiny either, which may suggest that to the authorities, internet ticketing scams don’t warrant a great deal of attention. While some small fry may be prosecuted, the major players remain free to try their scams again.

A recent think tank report chided U.S. authorities for doing little to prosecute internet fraud, and despite a 2005 call by British concert promoters to more strongly police internet ticket touts, British authorities have done little as well. Some three years later, British cybercrime policing is still in its infancy, waiting for funding.

The question is whether the scam website operators went too far with the Olympics ticketing frauds, and whether public outcry this time will catch the attention of the authorities. Already officials with both the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and the 2012 London Summer Olympics have promised to do a better job of making sure ticket buyers aren’t ripped off by scam websites. But then again, similar promises were made by officials with the Beijing Games, and they proved to be hollow.

Clearly, the alleged internet scammers are counting on the promises to be hollow again. Before they went into receivership, Xclusive Tickets Ltd. and Xclusive Leisure & Hospitality Ltd. bought at least eight internet domain names connected to the Vancouver Games and at least one that could be used to sell tickets to the London Olympics. Then in the last month it transferred those domain names over to TheOnlineTicketExchange.com — not surprisingly, yet another Terance Shepherd related website. If the past is any indication, it could well be that they are getting ready for a brand new round of false promises to hopeful ticket buyers.