A Beautiful Fraud

Say what you will about the guys who put up http://www.beijingticketing.com/.  There are stories out there denouncing this as a fradulent website that should be shut down.  Well, it may be early days and it is possible that it is a legit website (although probably not).  If it's fake ... and lots of people have been duped out of thousands of dollars, well, a crime has been committed and you've got to go after the bad guys.  But if this is fraud then it's spectacular fraud.  The website is clean, it's plausible, it's richly detailed and it's functional.  If an idiot gets scammed by some snopes-tested Nigerian email fraud then that person deserves what's coming to them.  Unsophisticated fraud will get unsophisticated and greedy victims who we don't really feel sorry for (unless it's us).  But this is so subtle - it's not necessarily going after greed (unless they're massively undercutting) nor is it a carbon copy of a bank website which will suck in anyone not paying attention (sophisticated, sure, but something we're always wary about) - it's the kind of site that we expect, the kind of URL that we expect but it's fake.  And people are expecting to shell out thousands for the tickets so even a brief run is all it takes to make millions (hundreds of millions).  It's bad, yes, but it's beautifully bad.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/latest-news/aussies-the-losers-in-ripoff/2008/08/03/1217701854125.html