Expert British fraud tricks hundreds in Olympics ticketing scam

When you look to buy tickets to the Olympics on the Internet, www.beijingticketing.com seems like an obvious avenue considering that the much publicized games are being held at the Chinese capital. However, there's a slight problem. Not only will you not get those expected tickets, but you will also lose your hard-earned money – as hundreds have learnt to their chagrin.

That's because this slick, professional-looking website, which boasts offices in Sydney, London and New York, is actually a scam and the owners have gone missing, with the customers' money of course.

Duped customers can take solace from the fact that they are not alone, and neither are they the first ones to be tricked thus by the master scamster and brains behind the operation – Terence Shepherd. The 49-year old Londoner, now believed to be hiding in Barbados, had earlier been accused of selling non-existent World Cup Cricket tickets for English matches for up to $6000 each.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has received complaints from hundreds of alleged victims all over the world with some customers handing over thousands of dollars for non-existent tickets.

Families of Australian Olympic athletes including beach volleyballer Natalie Cook and politician leader Kerry Chikarovski were burned in the scam. It seems that the biggest victim was a Texas-based travel agent, Jolanta Sochacka who shelled out $57,000 for a family of seven. She said that the company looked so legitimate because its website was so elaborate.

Investigators have tailed the company to an empty office in Phoenix, Arizona and the IOC and the US Olympic Committee (USOC) have managed to have the offending website, and another related one called www.beijing-tickets2008.com shut down. They are no longer accessible on the Internet.

Before this, Shepherd had not restricted his activities to cricket alone, but had been under investigation by the soccer and rugby governing bodies for similar frauds. The British rugby body NRL looked closely into his activities after his company, Sports Mondial, was found to have obtained illegally $22,000 worth of tickets for the grand final.

The Supreme Court ruled that Sports Mondial was a black market ticket seller and ordered it to refund $36,450 to 81 clients who had bought hospitality packages that included dinner, champagne and tickets to the final.

Ken Gamble, an Australian investigator who had been on Shepherd's track since 2003, said, ''It's an extraordinarily well organized syndicate of fake websites, which also deliberately oversells tickets for major events on legitimate websites. The story's always the same - it's an unfortunate mistake or someone has let them down. They promise a refund which never happens and the credit companies end up paying all the refunds. It's all part of the elaborate scam."