According to London Olympics chief Sebastian Coe people who buy tickets but are unable to use them can use an official exchange to sell the tickets at face value only with no markup above face value. At a recent meeting of national Olympic committees in Acapulco, Mexico, Coe added:

"It is not allowed to sell an Olympic ticket for more than face value," Coe said. "It's a very simple concept. We will enforce this vigorously and we do have the ability to close down online sites." About 1 million tickets will be distributed among the national Olympic committees.

"There is a problem and we do not want those tickets to end up in the black market," Coe added.

We all know that a significan proportion of these give-away tickets will end up on the secondary market for significant profits. It's the same for any event on this scale.

I am curious how far the Met Police can go in terms of prosecuting sites running on servers outside of the UK. Certainly they will not have any jurisdiction in a country with stringent privacy laws such as the Caymans or other offshore business islands. I am also very surprised that the Summer Olympics strategy of creating and profiting from an open resale marketplace did not make it to the summer version of the Olympics this year.

The result will be, time and money will be wasted by the Metropolitan police trying to crackdown on resale sites outside of the UK, Time and energy will be wasted by olympic officials responsible for monitoring sales outside of official channels, and the fact is - tickets will be resold, there's no stopping it. The 'Official' marketplace will be as quiet as a graveyard and be a ripe picking ground for secondary ticket brokers to pick up cheap inventory and resell.

Wrong strategy - and one that will backfire - because they won't be able to stamp out the secondary ticket market, they won't profit from the secondary ticket market and they will waste time, money and resources trying to control something that is absolutely uncontrollable and simply a reflection of market supply and demand.

They are better off creating an official open marketplace which allows resellers to sell and profit and take a percentage, therefore not only saving money, but making it... Let market value be determined by the market.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) Winter Olympics in 2010 chose a different approach by building its own ticket marketplace platform (like eBay for Tickets) to allow the resell tickets in a way that protected consumers and ensured full audiences. And they also made significant profits by participating in revenue by taking a share of sales and controlling the secondary market rather than trying to police it.