Ticket Scalping

Railroad tickets are a dangerous business in China. Retired military man Wang Hanlin opened a travel agency here a decade ago, but found that the best seats disappeared no matter how early you tried to buy them. When he asked why, Wang recalls, he was told to keep his mouth shut. When he persisted, he got his answer from six thugs who jumped him in broad daylight and beat him with a pipe, smashing his legs.

BEIJING -- It is not as though all 1.3 billion people in China are trying to attend the Olympics. It just seems that way if you're trying to book a seat. Tickets to the 2008 Games are proving to be among the most coveted in sporting history. Money, luck, persistence, computer skills and, in some cases, the right political background are among the prerequisites. Scalpers already are demanding as much as $40,000 a seat for the Aug.

No, they probably don't need tickets. On game days, you see them prowling the streets outside Dodger Stadium, flashing more signs than a third-base coach, their hand-scrawled scraps of cardboard reading, "I need tickets." But what they really need is to scalp tickets -- and not get arrested in the process. The signs are a code to attract potential buyers, without announcing an intention to violate the law.

You need only two of the primo tickets you bought for the NCAA championship game on April 2 in Atlanta's Georgia Dome. So the next move is to scalp the extras online, where men's college basketball tournament tickets with a face value of $204 are on sale for as much as $5,800 apiece. Not so fast. The NCAA, tired of third-party brokers siphoning off money by reselling tournament tickets, is threatening to blacklist fans who are caught scalping tickets anywhere other than RazorGator.

Ticketmaster says a federal judge in Los Angeles has granted the company's request to block a software company from making or distributing computer programs used to flood Ticketmaster's website with orders. The preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins was in response to a lawsuit filed this year by Ticketmaster against RMG Technologies Inc.

The New England Patriots have won a bid to get the names of all the fans who bought or sold -- or tried to buy or sell -- tickets to home games through online ticket reseller StubHub Inc., a move one technology group sees as an invasion of privacy. A lawsuit filed last year against San Francisco-based StubHub claimed it encouraged fans to break state law and violate team policies. The team said it could seek to revoke season tickets of people who used StubHub.

Chinese railway authorities have launched an all-out attack on "yellow bulls" in and around its 5,700 train stations nationwide. Although the phrase evokes some new strain of hoof-and-mouth disease, it is in fact a century-old Chinese term for scalpers. "Even our cooks have been called to the front lines to fight yellow bulls," said Jiang Zhanlin, director of the Railway Ministry's police department. "We're prepared to fight as long as it takes."

The one night that looked like easy money, the streets fat with customers and cash, Benny Castellon stood empty-handed. Everyone knew that women's figure skating would be the big event of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Castellon certainly knew it. But the morning of the final, he says, a shop that was supposed to feed him black-market tickets was shut down by police. "Big night if you can touch tickets," he said. "If you can't touch 'em, it's pointless."

The subject of ticket distribution and scalping has been a hot topic this week from New Jersey to Los Angeles to Washington, where the U.S. House and Senate have been investigating the proposed merger of ticket giant Ticketmaster with Live Nation, the world's biggest concert promoter. Now a new voice is joining the chorus -- No Doubt, the multiplatinum band from Anaheim whose reunion tour is being greeted as one of the hottest tickets of the summer.

A lawsuit claims two companies scalped tickets to this year's Academy Awards ceremony for as much as $85,000 each. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences filed the suit Tuesday in Los Angeles against Red Baron Records and Millionaire's Concierge. The two companies didn't immediately return e-mailed requests for comment. The suit claims Anaheim-based Red Baron worked through an Australian company to sell five tickets to the Feb. 24 show for $85,000 each. It contends that the head of Florida-based Millionaire's Concierge offered to sell an undercover investigator two Oscar tickets for $23,000 each.