Xiong Xiancai, a 24-year-old unemployed man from China’s eastern province of Zhejiang has been jailed for three years for pretending to be an Olympics official and taking RMB50,000 ($6,800) from a woman after he promised to secure tickets to the opening ceremony.

The Beijing News reports he told a woman he was an employee of the ‘marketing strategy department’ of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG).

Chaoyang District People’s Court also fined Xiong RMB3,000, as part of a punishment it said was lenient.

The court is reported to have said, ‘In the view of Xiong’s voluntary admission of guilt, the court handed down light punishment.’

Beijing is also trying local resident Cui Suozhu, who is accused of cheating RMB260,000 ($35,000) out of the head office of China Travel Service by offering to arrange the state-owned travel agency a BOCOG ‘approval document’ to hold an Olympics-related event.

Cui paid RMB500 to a counterfeiter to fake the document and passed it off to a CTS employee who had been charged with arranging the approval, the paper said in a separate report.

BOCOG subsequently identified the approval as a fake.

The case continues.
Source: Guardian Unlimited

Rong Jun, the head of ticket sales for the Beijing Olympics was sacked after the computer system crashed after receiving 20 million hits in the first three hours of opening.

The sale of 1.85 million tickets, available first-come, first-served, had to be abandoned after less than 24 hours on October 30.

The system, which was designed to handle 150,000 ticket sales an hour, crashed under the weight of eight million hits in the first hour. Only 9,000 tickets were sold.

Rong Jun, in tears, made a public apology. Not enough. Now he is out.

Mark you that seems fair enough. Anyone who thought a system handling 150,000 tickets an hour would handle the rush — expecially in China where this is something of a ritual — is plainly a few fen short of a yuan.

Organizers will now use the lottery system that was used in April when the next phase of ticket sales begins on December 10. Seven million tickets for the Games, to be held on August 8-24, are available to the public. Nearly three quarters of the tickets are reserved for residents of mainland China.
Source: The Times

The ticketing center of Beijing Organizing Committee of Olympic Games (BOCOG), which had its computer system collapse under the load of tickets applications, says it is now going to those applications priority.

It means that the center will firstly deal process applications from people who registered authentic ID information at any Bank of China outlets or the Ticketing Call Center on October 30th.

According to a statement released by the BOCOG, The Bank of China outlets and the Ticketing Call Center will contact every individual who on October 30th registered with valid ID information and contact numbers.

These applicants can submit ticket applications and payments by 5 p.m. on November 30, rather than waiting for a random draw.

Only 43,000 tickets were sold before the computer crashed.

Olympic ticket sales will resume next month and tickets will be allocated by a random draw after those who had registered have first try. The first batch of 1.6 million tickets were allocated by lottery earlier this year.

A total of seven million tickets for the Aug. 8-24 Games are available to the general public with nearly three quarters reserved for domestic sales.
Source: China View

First understand the concept. Your ticket does not need to be punched, examined, handled by humans. Wave it past the scanner and you are in. This is now a well established procedure and most of us have used it or seen it in use.

There are, but of course, different standards, but the one which will be used at the Olympics supports the ISO 14443 type B contactless standard. As with most transit cards, data on the small chips embedded in the tickets for the games will be hard-coded. Chinese officials are ordering more than 12 million paper contactless tickets for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, more than was earlier projected.

France-based contactless vendor ASK has announced its Chinese joint venture had won a contract to supply contactless inlays for 12.2 million low-cost tickets that will be issued to attendees of the games.

The contract calls for ASK TongFang to provide the chip-and-antenna inlays to China Banknote Printing, which will then supply the actual tickets.

The tickets also will carry anti-fraud printing features. They are not, however, totally fraud-proof. But safer than, say, bar codes or other methods.

Organizers of the World Cup football tournament in Germany in 2006 issued more than 3 million paper contactless tickets. There appear to have been no forgeries although, of course, it did nothing to improve the behavior of the English football fans.

ASK formed its joint venture with Tsinghua Tongfang, a mostly state-owned computer and IT company, in 2005.
Source: Card Technology

About 1.85 million tickets for the 2008 Olympic Games will go on sale as the second round of booking starts this week.

Rong Jun, head of BOCOG’s ticketing center, said, ‘The tickets will be sold on the ‘first come, first serve’ basis in this stage.’
Rong said that each person is allowed to buy a maximum of 50 tickets, while a limit of two tickets at most is applied for the high-demand events.

Excluding those reserved for the Olympic Family, sponsors and rights-holding broadcasters, more than seven million tickets are available for sale, with about 40% being reserved for domestic sale.

According to BOCOG, the 63,000 tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies at the 91,000-seat National Stadium, dubbed the ‘Bird’s Nest’, and over two million tickets for sports events were sold out during the first stage between April and August this year.

To make the Olympics affordable to average Chinese residents, about 58% of the tickets are priced at RMB100 (about $13.3) or below, and 14% will be reserved for Chinese students for RMB10 or less.

Income from ticket sales is expected to reach about $140 million and BOCOG is confident of reaching the target.
Source: China View