Fans warned over bogus tickets

Tickets for next year's World Cup that are bought on internet auction sites or from unauthorised outlets will not be honoured and people risk being turned away from matches.

Some tickets are already appearing on sites such as eBay and have been receiving bids of more than twice their face value. A package of four tickets for matches in Barbados, with a face value of $US900, had attracted bids higher than $US1900 with a day left in the auction.

Stephen Price, the World Cup commercial manager, said officials are working with eBay and internet monitoring services to work out who is selling tickets. "We're telling people before they make a bid on eBay that those tickets won't be valid," he said. "We're trying to protect people from price gouging."

Price added that the problem had first been noticed last month and that the number of tickets being offered online is in the hundreds rather than thousands.

People who have bought any of the 800,000 tickets that are available through official channels won't have received them yet as mailing only starts in January. "People are selling tickets they haven't even received yet," Price said.