Chinese soccer fans duped into buying fake FIFA World Cup tickets

More than 3,500 fake World Cup tickets were allegedly sold to China as multiple Chinese soccer fans have been denied entry to matches in Moscow.

Thirty soccer fans from Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality were barred from entering the stadium for the World Cup match between Argentina and Iceland on Saturday, Chongqing Morning Post reported on Sunday.

More than 90 soccer fans from Chongqing will be affected for the same reason during the tournament, said an official at Chongqing Tourism Development Commission. More than 1,000 fake tickets were also sold in Chengdu, Southwest China’s Sichuan Province, Yang Jun, a travel manager at China Youth Travel in Sichuan, was quoted by news website thecover.cn as saying.

All fake tickets came from Russia-based travel agency ANJI MSK, which sold more than 10,000 fake tickets for the World Cup, 3,500 of them sent to China, according to Yang.

ANJI MSK claimed to be an authorized ticket seller, which it has not, and allegedly deceived Chinese travel agencies into dealing with them. The latter did not receive tickets even after they landed Chinese soccer fans in Russia.

A fake ticket victim from South China’s Guangdong Province, surnamed Xue, had to buy a ticket from a scalper on site to enter the stadium, Beijing News reported on Sunday. The ticket, originally priced at $165, was sold to him for more than 10,000 yuan ($1,553). Since he had planned the entire trip around the match, he had to buy a ticket at such a high price, Xue said.

The Chinese Embassy in Russia warned on its WeChat account on Thursday that ANJI MSK faked their documents, and reminded Chinese fans to purchase World Cup tickets through authorized outlets.

ANJI MSK’s office in Moscow is now empty, Chongqing Morning Post reported.