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USOC Alleges Ticket Fraud By Web Sites

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 27, 2008

Consumers trying to buy tickets to the Beijing Olympics in August have been duped by at least two Web sites that charged their credit cards but never mailed the tickets, according to lawsuits filed Tuesday by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Lawyers for the committee claim the two sites, beijingticketing.com and beijing-2008tickets.com, illegally used Olympic trademarks and sold tickets that were never sent to the buyers. The lawsuits, filed in the federal districts of Arizona and Northern California, ask the courts to impound the companies' domain names and to order them to stop using the Olympic trademarks as well as claiming to sell Olympic tickets.

"American consumers are being defrauded," said Rana Dershowitz, general counsel for the USOC. She said the companies' activities also hurt the USOC brand, which in turn hurts the athletes who receive funding to compete.

E-mail messages and telephone calls to numbers listed on the Web sites were not returned.

The USOC has authorized only one company, known as both CoSport and Jet Set Sports, to sell tickets in the United States. Under rules established by the Beijing Organizing Committee, the tickets cannot be resold by commercial brokers.

Tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies are embedded with a microchip that will allow authorities to verify a ticket holder's name, photo and passport number. Tickets can be transferred only once, and the transfers must be approved by the Beijing committee.

Still, many online brokers are selling tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies at steeply inflated prices without notifying potential buyers of restrictions. Tickets to the opening ceremony were selling at ticketnetwork.com for as much as $24,750 each Wednesday, even though the deadline for transferring the tickets to a new owner passed July 15. A spokeswoman for TicketNetwork did not comment.

At ticketcity.com, eight tickets to the closing ceremony were selling Wednesday afternoon for a more modest $2,880 apiece, but there was no mention that ticket holders would need to transfer ownership in Beijing before July 30. After a reporter contacted TicketCity, which is based in Austin, Texas, the tickets disappeared from the site.

Obama To Run Ads During Olympics

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama is going for the gold.

The Democratic presidential contender has decided to buy $5 million in national advertising on NBC during the broadcast of the Olympic Games, an NBC spokeswoman confirmed. The ads will appear on network and cable channels.

The Olympics, to be held in Beijing, will open Aug. 8. Such an extensive purchase of ad time would give Obama wide exposure before the Democratic National Convention, to be held the last week in August.

Obama has the resources: He has set fundraising records and reported raising $52 million in June, more than twice the $21.5 million raised by his rival, Republican John McCain.

At the same time, the expenditure is as significant for its reach as for the bold statement it makes. Obama has been airing ads in 18 states, reaching key battlegrounds as well as states that have traditionally voted Republican in presidential elections, including Alaska and Virginia.

Olympic Hotels Slash Rates As Costs, Visa Rules Deter Visitors

Beijing hotels are slashing rates by as much as 50 percent for next month's Olympics in a last-ditch bid to lure tourists put off by soaring travel costs and difficulties obtaining visas.

Hotels that ramped up their prices anticipating an Olympic windfall are backtracking as bookings lag behind expectations. The capital's four-star hotels aren't even half-booked, compared with normal occupancy of 80 percent in August, Beijing tourism officials said.

"Even if the price is down to the bottom, it's no use because nobody is coming," Liu Liping, sales manager of Beijing Ziyu Hotel, said in an interview.

His three-star hotel on the west side of the city is only 10 percent booked in August and has dropped rates by almost half in the space of a month to 1,180 yuan ($173) per night.

Beijing's government said last week it expects 400,000 to 450,000 foreign visitors in August, compared with 420,000 a year earlier. Stricter enforcement of entry rules - an Olympic ticket doesn't guarantee a visa - and the impact of surging oil prices on flight costs haven't helped, tourism officials say.

China tightened its visa process in March after saying it foiled terrorist plots targeting the Olympics.

Five-star hotels have lowered rates by an average 35 percent, and four-star hotels by 29 percent, according to data on Ctrip.com International Ltd. and Elong Inc., China's most popular online ticketing agents. Three-star hotels are cutting prices by 36 percent and two-star hotels by 35 percent.

International Baseball Federation Changes Rules For Extra Innings

Extra innings will have a new look in what could be baseball's last Olympic appearance.

Each team's at-bat in the 11th inning and beyond will begin with runners on first and second bases. Teams may start the 11th at any point in their batting order under format changes announced Friday by the International Baseball Federation and adopted in time for next month's Beijing Games.

Baseball and softball are making their last appearance for a while, after the International Olympic Committee voted to eliminate the sports from the 2012 London Games. Both sports are working to be reinstated for the 2016 Olympics.

Federation president Harvey Schiller said the extra-innings change was adopted to save time.

The 12th inning and beyond would begin where the previous lineup left off, with the two hitters ahead of the batter scheduled to lead off that inning being placed on first and second.

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