Jan. 22 (NBD) – "Buying low and selling high" is always the maxim to make money in the market. Going the opposite way may also bring a fortune but things couldn't end well. 

On April 18, the court of Jing'an district, Shanghai heard a special fraud case.

Yuan Ting, who pretended to be an assistant to general manager at Disneyland, ended up in the dock after cashing out over 7 million yuan (1.0 million U.S. dollars) through buying Disneyland tickets high and selling them low.

"I fell into huge debts of over 100,000 yuan (14,917.6 U.S. dollars) on the credit card," the post-90s girl from Shanghai cried. "My expenses were tremendously high but I used to earn merely 4,500 yuan (671.3 U.S. dollars) per month." 

To get out of debt, she came up with the idea of earning money by reselling Disneyland tickets as she had worked as an intern for four months. 

Photo/Shetuwang

Surprisingly, different from other vendors who pocket the difference in prices, Yuan traded Disneyland tickets at prices lower than the level she purchased from Disneyland's official website or other agencies.

"I planned to gain the trust of consumers first. As long as I won their trust, I would no longer need to give them tickets at once," noted the appellee, adding she could then use the money for personal use, and when the buyers headed to Disneyland, she would embezzle money received from other sources to buy tickets for them, that is, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Through such a trick, Yuan quickly developed five agents.

However, in June 2018, she encountered a capital chain rupture after squandering the money received on plastic surgery and luxury goods in addition to paying off the credit card bill. The truth eventually came to light.

She disclosed as of June 5 of last year, about 1,520 tickets she promised hadn't been issued. Yet the total amount might be larger as her agents had not delivered all the orders.

In fact, it is not an individual fraudulent case involving Disneyland tickets after the theme park became a sensation in China.

As early as 2017, consumers reported that they purchased low-priced tickets from ticketing agencies, only to find the ticket issuers had run away.

NBD noticed that Disneyland has 36 third-party authorized partners, including Ctrip and China International Travel Service Limited (Head Office), for ticket distribution in addition to its official website. Prior to the partnership with these companies, Disneyland had underscored that tickets shall be directly sold to customers rather than lower agents. 

However, many tickets actually were traded in the secondary market.

It's a pyramid system under which customers purchased tickets from agents in the bottom layer, and after the money was transferred to upper levels, tickets were reversely given back to customers in the end.

According to lawyer Xing Xin, the multi-layered reselling system would pose risks for both consumers and agents at lower levels.

"Consumers might encounter deceit and practice that violates the regulations," Xing observed, "and agents at lower levels might suffer a breach of contract."

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn