15-year-olds turn brokers for WC tickets

MUMBAI: When it comes to buying and selling World Cup tickets, there are some unusual dalals in the market. School and college students aged 15 to 20 are involved as 'brokers' in World Cup tickets to make a quick buck.
Some students are doing so bang in the middle of their board exams, putting studies on the back-burner. But, while money has exchanged hands, nobody has actually seen the tickets.
M S Dhoni and Kumar Sangakkara are not the only ones for whom the stakes are high in the World Cup finals on Saturday, which is seeing lakhs of rupees changing hands between students.
TOI spoke to a BCom student while he was in the midst of a frantic bout of brokering. "I have been offered tickets for Rs 55,000 in the East stand, Rs 70,000 in the North stand and Rs 1.85 lakh in the hospitality box,'' said the boy, who is looking to sell them at a higher price and earn a commission. He's willing to bargain, though. But, like a prudent broker, he will sell the tickets only when he has them in hand. The last time someone tried selling him tickets, they turned out to be fake.
Not everyone is as wise as him. He knows of friends who have paid a high price for tickets that never arrived, and even sold the non-existent tickets to other people without actually having them in hand. The boys now find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
Psychiatrist Dr Anjali Chhabria has come across five youngsters who have offered to sell her World Cup tickets. "One of them happened to be an IGCSE student whose parents have been complaining that he's spending far more time brokering deals for World Cup tickets than focusing on the board exams,'' she said. Of the five students who contacted her, two were 15 years old, two were 17 and one was 20.
Many of these students responded to a request for World cup tickets that Chhabria had posted on Blackberry Messenger. She herself was nearly conned by a youngster offering tickets. "After paying for 20 tickets, I got a call from the boy's parents, informing me that he was only 17, and that they would return the money to her as he did not really have any World Cup tickets.