2023-05-11 09:14:06
Buyers from more than 150 countries, a website that is facing crazy crowds and exceptional demand despite a controversy over prices… The first phase of the sale of ticket packs for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, which has been launched on February 15 and lasted just over a month, was a real success.
In a few weeks, 3.25 million tickets have been sold on the official Olympics website. And this Thursday morning, it’s a new batch of 1.25 million tickets which are offered during a single sale phase… But already, an illegal parallel market and scams seem to be developing on the Internet. Indeed, even if a resale platform will soon be set up, some are already trying to offer second-hand tickets in order to earn money, or even to rip off sports fans who are frustrated at not having got tickets for the Olympics through official channels.
Gendarmerie investigators specializing in cybercrime, responsible for combating this parallel and illegal trade, have already detected 44 sites visibly created from scratch and offering ticket resales… whether they are real or not. “We started cyber patrols in March 2023, during the first phase of Olympic ticket sales, underlines Captain Étienne, from Comcybergend. At the very beginning, a few days after the sale by the Olympic Committee, we saw offers for unit sales appear on social networks. But very quickly, we came across much more organized and professional things. »
“Some looked like official resale sites”
In April, cyber-gendarmes thus saw the appearance of resale websites. Some had obviously been ready for several months and were posted online when the official Olympic Games tickets were just available. “A few of them were quite crude, including spelling mistakes, but others were pretty well done and looked like official resale sites. »
During the month of April, 21 sites were thus detected by the gendarmes. Since the beginning of May, around twenty others have already been spotted. The Olympic Committee, alerted by the gendarmerie, officially requested the closure of these fraudulent sites, and seventeen have already disappeared from the web. If the others persist in staying online, or if they reopen under another alias, the gendarmes will then try to trace their creators. Thanks to the help of Europol, the perpetrators could be tracked down abroad if necessary.
But despite these offensive actions and constant monitoring, investigators fear that more and more fraudulent sites will emerge as the Olympic Games approach and single tickets go on sale by the Olympic Committee. “We are convinced that people have already bought many places to make capital gains,” says Captain Étienne. But the risk of these illegal resales is above all to buy empty! In recent days, we have seen packages for sale for 6,000 euros, without any certainty that the tickets offered by this site really exist! The gendarmes have also recently seen the emergence of tickets at discounted prices on a few websites. Very likely scams again.
#Paris #Olympics #ticket #scams #land #Internet #fraudulent #sites #detected