Alleged fraud puts shadowy world of ticket brokers under scrutiny
This one’s a bit hard to follow, but the bottom line is that at least 1,200 tickets purchased through an online broker based in Arizona have failed to materialize, leaving folks who paid a high premium—$5,000, in the case of one Vancouver lawyer—out in the cold. The Arizona company was to source $423,469 worth of tickets from another broker based in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and evidently didn’t ask many questions about where the Georgia company was getting them. Turns out there was yet a third supplier involved, and that party was apparently in hock to a Hong Kong finance company, which is holding onto the tickets as payment for the debt. Hope you have all that straight. Olympic organizers in Vancouver have repeatedly warned customers to buy only through their two approved brokers (the Arizona company is not one of them)—all well and good except that getting decent seats at a given event through these conventional channels is nearly impossible. Hence the migration of wealthy fans to Internet brokers.