WBC Tokyo Ticket Resale Suspects Referred to Prosecutors

Tokyo, April 17 (Jiji Press)–Police referred a man and a woman to prosecutors Friday on charges of reselling tickets for World Baseball Classic games in Tokyo this year, as well as for the U.S. Major League Baseball Tokyo Series last year, at prices up to nine times their original costs. The 51-year-old male company employee from Nishitokyo, a western suburban city in Tokyo, and the 33-year-old self-employed woman from the capital’s Shinjuku Ward both have admitted to breaking the anti-scalping law, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department said. The woman was quoted as saying that she thought tickets for superstar Shohei Ohtani’s games would attract premium demand. According to the police allegations, the man resold six tickets for some of the much-heralded international and MLB games at the Tokyo Dome stadium in Bunkyo Ward, including the Japan-Taiwan match in the WBC Tokyo Pool, to three separate buyers for a total of 1.52 million yen, against their combined face value of 194,000 yen, between March 12 last year and January 17 this year. Meanwhile, the woman sold six tickets for Japan’s Tokyo Pool game against South Korea and other WBC matches originally worth 130,500 yen in total to three buyers for 830,000 yen in January. The TMPD’s cyber investigation squad suspects that the man actually resold 64 tickets on a dedicated website between February last year and January this year, earning around 4.17 million yen. “I really wanted to watch Shohei Ohtani (live),” a buyer was quoted as saying. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]