Vancouver Olympics Tickets Resale Scams: How to Protect Yourself

With the Vancouver 2010 Olympics fast approaching, organizers of the 2010 games are concerned about Olympics tickets resale scams on sites like eBay and Craigslist.

Vancouver 2010 has a website for people to sell their tickets to anyone after they have already paid for them, but they are having a difficult time controlling the resale of tickets on other sites that cannot be authenticated.

In the same evening that VANOC first released tickets to the first round of lottery winners, hundreds of listings appeared on eBay, Ticketsnow.com and Craigslist, and some of the tickets were listed for as much as $5,000 a piece to events like the men's Gold Medal Hockey final.

VANOC has said again and again that it's not a good idea to buy tickets from a second-hand site with no authentication, but scams and illegitimate resales are still happening. VANOC has also prohibited people from reselling tickets at above face value, but they can only control this if someone is reported for doing so.

The biggest worry seems to be that when someone resells a ticket in a legitimate way their original ticket becomes void, but there have been occasions where those void tickets have ended up on a second hand site and then resold to some unsuspecting person who finds out when it's too late that their Olympic ticket was already sold to someone else.

Even a search on Vancouver's Craigslist site today brought up a number of results for Olympic tickets. Although some are for swapping and of course, not every listing is from someone wanting to scam you, but it's important to know the risks of buying expensive tickets in this way and how to protect yourself.

1. When possible and if you can, buy your tickets through VANOC's own ticket resale site and not through a second hand site.
2. Tickets can also be purchased from Jet Set Sports or CoSports as they are affiliated with the 2010 Games.
3. Know the risks if you do buy from a second hand site and from someone you don't know - your ticket may not be valid and you may not get in to your event.
4. If a deal is too good to be true, it probably is. Do your research. If tickets for an event were originally sold at $200 each, no one would resell their tickets to the same event for $100 each. People want to make money so a good deal could very well be a scam.