Consumers have been warned to only buy their Rio Olympics tickets from reputable sources after sports fans lost money through fake and unscrupulous websites.
Kaspersky Labs analysts said that the anti-virus company is “constantly blocking dozens of newly registered domains” to fake ticket sales sites.
The sites are found to not only be selling tickets that do not actually exist, but also fraudulently accessing bank card information and stealing from accounts.
“According to our information, the creation of these fake sites usually involves international cybercriminal groups, each fulfilling its own part of the scam,” said Kaspersky analysts Tatyana Shcherbakova and Andrey Kostin.
“Each of these domains hosted good quality imitations of official services offering tickets to sporting events at this summer’s Games in Rio de Janeiro.”
Tickets4SummerGames is among the portals accused of not sending out tickets after taking money from customers. The CSO business news website reported that the Tickets4SummerGames website has since been taken down, but the Facebook page is still up, and contains messages from a number of customers claiming they have not received their tickets.
“By the time customers realise they won’t be getting the tickets they booked it will be too late to buy genuine tickets… especially if there’s no money in their bank account,” said the Kaspersky analysts.
“To avoid falling victim to the scammers’ tricks, sports fans should be careful and only buy tickets from authorised reseller sites and ignore resources offering tickets at very low prices.”
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