A 41-year-old Chinese national, who allegedly scalped more than 500 tickets to this year’s Beijing Olympics, was sentenced this week to nearly three years in jail and fined $65,000, according to the Associated Press.
The conviction is just the latest in a string of legal matters surrounding the 2008 Summer Games, which Chinese officials tightly controlled.
While the Beijing Games set an Olympics record for the overall number of tickets sold, officials went to great lengths to try to squelch the resale market, including embedding microchips in tickets. Their efforts largely worked, but there were still some brokers and scalpers who were able to resell tickets.
The convicted Chinese national was obviously not one of them. According to the Associated Press and the state-run Xinhua News Agency, the man allegedly used fake identification to obtain tickets on behalf of two unnamed Chinese companies and split the profits.
Between May and late July just days before the Olympics began, Chinese police reportedly arrested more than 100 scalpers who were trying to resell tickets.
