Online World Cup scalpers meet high-tech resistanceBy Doreen Carvajal International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, MAY 8, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/07/business/tkts.phpPARIS With tickets for World Cup games almost as precious as goals, desperate soccer fans are flocking to the Web to engage in a form of ticket scalping that comes with the usual huge markups and red-card threats to eject secondhand buyers from the stadiums.
New technology is a bane and a blessing for frantic international buyers in the last stage of sales for the remaining 3.1 million tickets to 64 games that begin in June across Germany.
The prized tickets are trophies in a strict selling and trading system, developed by Germany's local soccer organizing committee, to combat advanced online globalization of the black market. The organizers' weapons are pinhead-size radio frequency microchips inserted in tickets and old- fashioned shrill threats. Privacy advocates in Germany are more worried about the chips, raising Big Brother alarms about their links to an electronic database of personal information about purchasers.
The rules are that legally purchased tickets, with unique identification codes contained on individual chips, can be transferred only among relatives or in connection with hardship cases, not excluding assorted events of mass destruction like epidemics, earthquakes, natural catastrophes and acts of war.
But barring plagues and locusts, hope is eternal. Tickets for the finals are selling for upward of $3,000 on eBay in the United States, which has emerged as a ticket exchange of last resort because of new restrictions in Britain, where World Cup ticket scalping is a criminal offense.
Soccer governing bodies like FIFA, which presides over the World Cup, and UEFA, the European soccer authority, had lobbied hard for restrictions, arguing that it was a security issue, because violent fans could buy tickets online through individual sellers and find themselves seated next to rival supporters.
"The days of a ticket tout standing in the shadows are so far gone," said Jerry McGrath, legal counsel for UEFA, who noted that "traditionally the concern is the breakdown of crowd segregation so that different clubs and national teams are separated. Online sales threaten segregation because it is an uncontrolled market."
Britain has gone the furthest to regulate ticket sales, although sports bodies have unsuccessfully pressed eBay, the online auction company, to halt trading on Web sites in Germany and the United States, where similar regulation does not exist.
"We look at local laws and how they apply in every country," said Catherine England, a spokeswoman for eBay. "The policies reflect the legal statues in those countries."
The eBay site in the United States has become something of a Wild West, drawing global participation after Britain banned World Cup ticket scalping.
Ebay takes the view that the risks reside with the ticket buyer in cases of passes that are refused at stadium gates. So do some security experts.
"I would advise any fan, caveat emptor," said Douglas Greenwell of Group 4 Securicor, a security group for sporting events that has tracked Internet sales. "At worst, they're going to lose all their money. At best, the ticket is legitimate, but they may not get entry into the stadiums."
"Consider," he added, "watching it on television."
In a report to be issued Monday, Group 4 Securicor says World Cup tickets with a face value of as much as €600, or $764, were selling for an average of more than €1,400 through online outlets.
In April, when its survey took place, a pair of tickets to see England play Trinidad and Tobago in Nuremberg on June 15 sold for almost €2,200. Prices have been climbing even higher. Meanwhile, German organizers and FIFA officials continue to urge fans to shun the black market and buy through official channels at
www.FIFAworldcup.com or trade tickets on another officially sanctioned site where they are sold at face value.
Last-minute tickets, however, were difficult to obtain in the stage of sales that began in May, when tickets were made available sporadically as corporate sponsors released the ones that they did not plan to use.
High-paying corporate sponsors of World Cup games could claim as many as 490,000 of the 3.1 million tickets, although FIFA said companies ultimately exercised an option to buy only 380,000, more than 12 percent of the total.
"Consumers should take note," a FIFA press official said. "Match tickets that are obtained by way of an illicit ticket sale or promotion will be automatically subject to a possible cancellation."
In the officials' view, tickets purchased through any vehicle other than the official FIFA Web site were illicit sales. FIFA and the local organizing committee are betting they can maintain control on unauthorized sales through radio frequency chip technology. The microchips, with tiny antennas, were developed by Philips, the Dutch consumer electronics maker, which has paid more than €30 million to be one of the 15 World Cup sponsors.
This is the chip's first appearance in a major global sports event, although it already is in use in Real Madrid's stadium in Spain and in sports venues in Atlanta and Philadelphia.
To enter through stadium turnstiles at all World Cup games, visitors will have to pass their tickets over electronic readers that check the validity.
The chips, according to Alexander Tarzi, a spokesman for Philips, do not contain personal information but rather an identity code linked to a database of information supplied by original ticket holders. Security staff can match passport numbers and names supplied by the original purchaser with the fan at the gate.
In theory, it provides a check, but in practice, with massive numbers of people moving into the stadiums, black market ticket sellers are offering different advice. "It's very unlikely they will check," said one eBay seller in the United States who was offering two tickets for Paraguay vs. Sweden. "Half the stadium would have to be empty, and they definitely wouldn't want that. So I wouldn't worry." The trove of information linked electronically to the tickets has upset privacy advocates, who question why buyers were asked to supply their birth dates, e-mail address, passport number and bank account numbers.
"This is just a way to establish technology in Germany by imposing it on millions of football fans who are so eager to get a ticket that they would accept anything," said Rena Tangens, a spokeswoman for Foebud, a privacy rights group based in Biefeld, Germany.
"They ask your mobile phone number, your nationality and even what team you support, and we think that this is pretty dangerous in a country like Germany that has been big on nationalism in the past."
Thilo Weichert, a public official with the Independent Center for Data Protection in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, said he suspected that the real importance of the data was to gather marketing information.
"They want the names to sell to the sponsors," he said. "In the small print of contract conditions, there are indications they want this information. And they want it not only from the ticket holders but the ones who applied for tickets and didn't get anything."
Asked if World Cup sponsors could mine the information, Stephan Eiermann of the local organizing committee in Frankfurt offered a qualified answer.
"Generally, it is not planned to pass on any stored information," he said. But he added: "Upon placing their ticket order, each applicant had to explicitly consent to their data being passed on to third parties. If the applicant hasn't ticked the respective box in the form, their data will definitely not be used for any other purpose."
Philips hopes to introduce its chip technology at other global sport events, like the Olympics.
And some experts on sponsorships consider ticketing, with its trove of customer information, a new area for exploitation by companies paying huge amounts for partnership rights.
"This is, after all," said Nigel Currie, chairman of the European Sponsorship Association, in London, "the biggest branding event in the world."
