How Chinese gangs are scamming Japan’s Olympics ticketing system for major profits
- A loophole allows the gangs to cash in on frenzied demand for the first round of 3.98 million tickets issued for domestic buyers
- The gangs employ hundreds of Chinese living in Japan to buy tickets from registered vendors then resell them at up to 10 times the price to rich Chinese
They are easily able to get around measures designed to stop the tickets being resold, thanks to a simple loophole: only the person who is registered to buy the ticket can access the stadium but the name of the registered owner can be changed online with an ID and password issued at the time of purchase.
The loophole is allowing the gangs to cash in on frenzied demand for the first round of 3.98 million tickets issued for domestic buyers wanting to attend events at the games – which run from July 24 to August 9.
Demand for the tickets, which went on sale in May, has been so strong that many people have been unable to even log on to official sites to buy tickets and the demand has been driven even higher by the purchases of the criminal groups.
The weekly news magazine Friday interviewed a Chinese national who had managed to circumvent regulations on the resale of tickets.
The man’s network managed to obtain 80 tickets, including one particularly sought after Grade A ticket to the final of the men’s football tournament, he told the magazine. The price on the ticket was 67,500 yen (US$632) but he was able to sell it immediately for 600,000 yen.
There was never any doubt that it was going to be too attractive for criminals to pass up
“Soccer, basketball, table tennis, volleyball and swimming were in particularly high demand,” the man said. “Most of the buyers were wealthy people. We’ve got plenty of them in China these days.”
Jake Adelstein, a crime writer and author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Crime Beat in Japan, said the Olympics were inevitably going to present an opportunity for the underworld.
“When they set the price for a single seat at the opening ceremony at US$3,000, there was never any doubt that it was going to be too attractive for criminals to pass up,” he said.
“If you’re desperate to go and you have US$3,000 to spend for the opening ceremony, then you’re going to pay US$4,000 without even thinking about it.”
The Chinese national interview by Friday magazine estimated that of the initial release of 3.9 million tickets, Chinese resellers obtained as many as 300,000.
