Olympics: 2020 organizers reveal 6,900 tickets bought with fake IDs

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TOKYO. KAZINFORM The 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics organizing committee said Friday that about 6,900 tickets sold in the first phase of the Olympic domestic lottery in May were bought with fake IDs.

Organizers revealed that some 30,000 of the official IDs required to make a ticket application were created with fake personal information, with 1,200 of those winning the rights to buy tickets for the July 24-Aug. 9, 2020 Summer Games in Japan's capital, Kyodo News reports.

The total value of the tickets was about 180 million yen ($1.6 million). The tickets will be invalidated and not refunded due to being fraudulently purchased.

The organizing committee believes that a specific group orchestrated a plan to create fake IDs in order to secure Olympic tickets, and has already consulted with the Metropolitan Police Department. Organizers declined to discuss further details.

Japan residents who want to buy 2020 tickets are first required to register for an official Olympic ID with a name and address. Over 7.7 million had registered as of Friday.

Roughly 3.2 million tickets were sold in the first phase of ticket sales.

An additional ticket lottery closed in August for some 4.16 million residents of Japan who came up empty-handed in the initial draw, with about 120,000 winners out of the more than 1.4 million applicants buying around 350,000 of the over 680,000 tickets available so far.

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