One is in a pre-trial detention center, two are on the run, and two more are on bail. A lawsuit has started in Moscow in the high-profile case of the “ticket mafia”, which earned money by reselling tickets to the leading theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg. How was this underground empire organized and how much were those who wanted to go to the premieres of the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky to be swindled? Vitaly Gashakov, who was a member of the gang, often acted in films Pen master, handles the news feed.
3-4 times more expensive!
– I’ve been standing in line for tickets for eight hours! – Muscovite Anna Romanova is indignant at the camera. – Sleepy. Frozen. But I can’t leave. I promised the children that I would take them to a fairy tale!
End of November 2022. At the Bolshoi Theater (BT) – a long “sausage” of people wrapped up to the eyebrows. Places in the queue are taken from the evening, and the movement itself begins at 10 am, when the ticket office opens. Such excitement happens every year when ticket sales for traditional New Year’s performances of the legendary Nutcracker start. And so it was in 2021. And earlier.
The Nutcracker with beautiful music by Tchaikovsky is a brand. Bringing children to it or going to it yourself (and then, of course, boasting on social networks) is a sign of prosperity and a certain cultural level. That’s why the excitement.
But what’s the point in our age of advanced technology to stomp in line if you can buy anything on the Internet?
– In the early days, tickets are sold only at the box office of the Bolshoi Theater and only then – on the website. Moreover, they are divided into several slots according to dates and not all of them are thrown out at once, – Anna explains. “If you don’t buy it yourself, tickets for good seats will be at resellers, and then you can take them only for three prices. There isn’t much left on the site…
According to the woman, half of the current queue, if not more, are the same “outbids”. Of course, BT is trying to deal with this longstanding problem. For example, tickets have long been only nominal. And it is impossible to buy more than four in one hand (for this you need to present documents for yourself, your spouse and two children). But speculators easily bypass this barrier. And tickets appear on free ad sites with crazy markups (for example, a ticket bought for 5 thousand amid the hype around the Nutcracker can be valued at 15 thousand or 20 thousand). Dealers meet with the buyer at the Bolshoy, go with him to the box office, where the ticket is reissued to another person. This procedure is prescribed by law. The theater can’t stop it.
“So it turns out that either you stop yourself, or give some unrealistic money to swindlers,” Anna sums up.
However, physical resellers are just the tip of the iceberg. Where large sums of money are spinning from scammers who work via the Internet. Defeated by the security forces, one single ticket mafia is one of them.
Boardwalk Empire
“At first, it was an ordinary legal company that sold tickets for performances and sports matches with a small cheat,” says a law enforcement source.
The company was founded in 2013 by two comrades – Andrey Hartanyuk and Alexey Kurinov. Khartanyuk was responsible for raising money to promote the business, and Kurinov, a programmer by profession, took over the technical part of the project – he created websites and managed their work. Over the next four years, they were one of dozens (if not hundreds) of companies trading as counterparties in tickets to mass events.
“But then Khartanyuk figured out how to earn ten times more in this market,” our interlocutor continues.
According to investigators, it was Khartanyuk who instructed Kurinov to create exact copies of the official websites of the most popular centers of culture in Russia – the Bolshoi, Maly, Mariinsky theaters, the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and so on. For example, the official website of the Mariinsky Theater is mariinsky.ru, and the scammers bought similar domain names for their fake pages – mariinskii.com and mariinskiy-theatre.com. How many people, when clicking on a link, will pay attention to a couple of letters that have changed?
At the same time, the businessmen paid the search engines so that when queries were made at the top of the search, it was their pages that popped up.
“The business was that real tickets, already bought from the theater, were exhibited on clone sites, but at some incredible prices,” says the source. – For example, a ticket for the same “Nutcracker” in the Bolshoi was purchased for 20 thousand, and on the site it was already 600 thousand. And they did buy it!
The underground empire grew and developed. At its peak, up to 150 people worked as call center operators and technical staff! Many, by the way, did not even suspect that they were participating in some kind of fraud – they thought it was an ordinary agent company selling tickets. There were six people in the leadership of the ticket mafia. For example, Andrei Khartanyuk’s mother was responsible for the creation of one-day firms (this is how they tried to get rid of financial traces of activity) and cashing in money coming to accounts. Several more women headed the companies that were part of this “holding”, and participated in the distribution of profits.
One of the leaders escaped
The underground business on tickets flourished for four years, through precocious firms, dodgers pumped about 1 billion rubles. The crooks felt so at ease that they even rented an office in an old building a couple of houses from Petrovka, 38, where the Moscow police are still located!
But in 2020, the Investigative Committee became interested in the cunning guys. It all started with the Mariinsky Theatre. There began to receive complaints from the audience: “Are you completely pissed off? The state subsidizes you. Why are concert tickets sold for 50-70 thousand rubles? At the Mariinsky Theater they denied that there had never been such prices for not the most prestigious places there. That’s how these fake sites surfaced.
Andrei Khartanyuk and his mother managed to escape. They are on the international wanted list. But the programmer Alexei Kurinov was detained. He is now on trial in the Tverskoy Court of Moscow, along with two former assistants. Members of the ticket mafia were charged with fraud (up to 10 years in prison) and “illegal use of means of individualization of goods” (that is, for copying other people’s sites – up to 6 years).
SPECIFICALLY
The most popular ticket scams
1. Concierge services
“Websites are being created on which tickets for sports, entertainment and cultural events are resold with large margins,” explains Vladimir Kalugin, COO of Group-IB (investigating cybercrimes) of the Digital Risk Protection Department, to KP.
Some of these sites imitate the sites of theaters or concert venues. Part – create your own design. The buyer does get the tickets. But at inflated prices.
“These sites are aggressively promoted in search engines,” the expert continues. – Due to gaps in the legislation, the activities of concierge services cannot be called completely illegal. Yes, some of them violate the rights to the brand, but there is no direct fraud in their actions.
At the same time, resellers are generally provided only with administrative procedures: at best, the company will be forced to pay a fine.
How not to become a victim
— Use trusted ticket aggregators and official websites of venues.
– Look at the “basement” of the site. It may say in small letters that this is a “concierge service”, “intermediary” or “agent”.
– Check through the search services the phone number listed on the site. If it was previously used by other organizations, this is an alarming bell.
2. Phishing (fake sites)
Fake ticket sites (both concert sites and those selling, for example, vacation packages) imitate the pages of official sellers. When filling out the form for payment, they are asked to enter data, up to the card number and passwords. Then the money is stolen.
3. False dates
“A girl meets a young man on social networks, then transfers communication to a messenger,” says Vladimir Kalugin. – Then he invites his chosen one on a date and sends him a link – he asks to pay for two tickets on a site that turns out to be phishing. And the paid money float away to swindlers.
The scam consists of two stages. First, in the process of light flirting, information about his tastes and financial capabilities is pulled from the “client”. Then they send a link to a suitable “event”.
“The scheme has gone through several reincarnations: at first, gentlemen were invited for romantic dates in the so-called “antikino” – cinemas with halls for two, but then the options for places for dates expanded to theaters, stand-up shows, restaurants, bars, hookahs,” the expert notes.
How not to become a victim (for schemes 2 and 3)
– Do not click on suspicious links. It does not matter who sends them – a stranger or a familiar person (his page on the network could be hacked). Use the links provided in the official verified company accounts.
– Pay attention to the domain name: it is often consonant with the official one, but it has differences. Often, fake sites use dubious domain zones that are different from the classic .ru, .com, .net, and so on.
– For online purchases, it is better to use a separate card with a limited amount of funds and connected payment verification. Before transfers and payments, carefully check the details.
CRIMINAL ROLE
The artist witnessed
Among the members of the group was a fairly well-known actor. Before working for the ticket cartel, 43-year-old Vitaly Gashakov actively acted in films. Let the roles were small, but in very cool projects. His portfolio includes “Day Watch”, the TV series “Next”, “Don’t Be Born Beautiful” and two dozen more works. In the group, he was responsible for finding premises for call centers and offices for programmers and couriers. After the arrest, Gashakov made a deal with the investigation and told in detail how it all worked. In the criminal case, he appears only as a witness.
QUESTION – EDGE
Where do these prices come from?
For the purity of the experiment, we check how resellers work on the Internet. We drive in the search engine “buy tickets to the Bolshoi Theater.” In the drop-down list of links, the real site of the Bolshoi bolshoi.ru is only the third. Above it are two obviously strange sites with the words “big” and “bol” in the addresses. They do not copy the design of the official BT page. And if you scroll to the bottom of the page, it honestly says: “concierge service” (see “Specifically”).
Let’s say we need tickets for “Coppelia” (a comic ballet by the Frenchman Leo Delibes based on a fairy tale by Hoffmann), which is on a new stage, on March 10, 19.00.
The official website offers tickets from 3750 to 5000 rubles. To purchase, you need to have a registered personal account (registration takes a couple of minutes).
Unofficial sites trade without any conditions: just choose the place you like and pay. But for one, the lower threshold for ticket prices starts at 7600 rubles, for the other – from 7650 (that is, 100% more expensive than the cheapest ticket from the officials).
At the same time, I know that, according to the law, resellers cannot be charged more than 10% from above. So where do these prices come from? I call the given numbers. The call center girl explains:
– Our price is formed not only from the cost of the ticket itself, but also from the payment for other services, for example, we will arrange the delivery of a ticket to your home.
Well, the profit for businessmen is also included in the amount …
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