Olympic ticket re-seller faces bankruptcy

[londonsummergames.org] and [euroteamtickets.com]. Only 5,000 of the purchased tickets were actually delivered to buyers according to the European Consumer Centre in Norway. EuroTeam is under current investigation by Britain’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) as well as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Police in Norway seized 455 of the tickets sold by EuroTeam – and investigators have alleged that many were illegally obtained by EuroTeam from the National Olympic Committees of two unidentified Eastern European countries. Euroteam’s owner, Atle Barlaup, called Olympic officials a “mafia” who used “all their resources to protect their own economic interests.” According to the Euroteam website, the actions of the IOC and the London Olympics were “done solely to harm a legally operating company in the interest of protecting the financial interest of the private organization IOC”  dispute a finding in the High Court in London that the EuroTeam website misled consumers. Whilst refunds have been promised to customers who did not receive tickets, Tickernews.com says that  the company doesn’t seem to have much hope of staying afloat.

Section 31 of the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, passed in 2006, made it a criminal offence to sell tickets without authorisation from the London Organising Committee (Locog) in the UK although once physical tickets became available holders could sell them for face value to friends and families.  The National Olympic Committee (NOC) of each participating country also received an allocation of tickets and in some countries there were authorised resellers are legitimately selling these tickets online. But EuroTeam was not seemingly one of them. Locog had warned UK fans to beware of bogus and unauthorised websites when searching for tickets from overseas sources.

And more on EuroTeam from Festival Republic here http://festivalrepublic.com/news/general/beware_of_euroteamnet_scam saying “The same site is now offering tickets for Reading and Leeds Festivals. They are NOT an authorised seller and we have issued NO ticket allocation to them or their affiliated sites”