Olympic ticket speculators may be detained and people who purchase Olympic tickets via the black market will probably be denied access to the Olympic Games, according to a citation of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) inside a report of the Chengdu Business News on September 6.

Olympic ticket speculators will face 10 to 15 days detention and a fine up to 1,000 yuan, according to the Law on Public Security Administration Punishments in China.

The BOCOG issued the warning recently in a bid to curb Olympic ticket speculations. At the end of last month, the BOCOG released 300,000 lottery winners across the Chinese Mainland awarding 1,593,345 tickets, including 26,000 tickets for the opening ceremony.

Ticket speculators appeared online soon after the BOCOG's phase one release. There were almost 300 Olympic ticket transfer notices on taobao.com, one of the busiest Customer to Customer (C2C) websites in China, on September 5, the Shanghai Morning Post reported a day after the lottery winners were announced. On the website a seller nicknamed "lpr" ?listed 50,000 yuan at his starting price for a 3,000-yuan ticket, the newspaper reported.

All the transfers of Olympic tickets should be conducted after July of next year when the tickets would be sent out, according to the BOCOG. And ticket owners are allowed to transfer their tickets only once and under designated procedures. Ticket applicants for the opening or closing ceremonies also must submit their photos.

The first phase of Olympic tickets sales began on April 15 with 720,000 applicants participating. The second phase will begin in October and follow a first-come-first-serve policy.

For more ticket details, please visit http://www.ccgp-fushun.com/english/olympic/211689.htm

(China.org.cn by Wu Jin, September 6, 2007)