Inside The Games website reports Texas lawyer Jim Moriarty has announced plans to sue the International Olympic Committee (IOC) over a London-based ticket scam in which hundreds of people paid more than a million pounds for tickets to the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games that never arrived. Moriarty is representing 400 victims worldwide.
According to the website, Moriarty has his legal sights on the London-based touts allegedly behind the scam, as well as the IOC, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) and the official U.S. providers of Beijing tickets, JetSet/CoSport.
Moriarty expects to file the lawsuits in the next 30 to 60 days. He said, “the ultimate bad guys are the crooks in England and then the people that aided and facilitated their fraud and that clearly goes back directly to the IOC”.
The Australian website sbs.com reports that Moriarty alleges the IOC was aware beijingticketing.com was operating with trademarked Olympic symbols emblazoned on the site, but failed to shut it down quickly enough.
He said, “I know with certainty the IOC and the USOC knew about it, but didn’t do anything effective about it. These fraud websites were using trade names that belonged to IOC. All the IOC or USOC would have had to have done is file a cyber squatting lawsuit and then generate some publicity over it and people would have realized that they were using the wrong sites”.
