Among the cheerful crowds waiting for the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing were dejected sports fans who discovered only once at the gate that they had bought fake tickets.
Some had spent nearly $2,000 on their bogus tickets and travelled huge distances. They were victims of what Olympic officials have identified as an international Internet scam.
"I was at the opening ceremony in Athens. I started at the very beginning to arrange be here and now ...," David Escarraz of Chicago said, his voice trailing away as his eyes teared up.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said this week that people have been swindled into buying thousands of fake tickets for the Games and that it would shut down fraudulent websites.
But that was cold comfort for Escarraz, who paid $3,730 for two tickets through a website.
"That site has been in operation since last fall. It was still selling tickets on July 25, the day before I left," he said. "If this was a problem for the IOC, why did they wait almost a year to do anything?"
The professional-looking site, which carried the official Beijing Games logo, provided a London phone number and a U.S. address in Phoenix, Arizona, was no longer accessible on Friday.
Among those left out of pocket were the families of Olympic athletes in both Australia and New Zealand, with people in the United States, Japan, Norway, China and Britain also reported by the media as having been conned by the sophisticated sting.
Escarraz sat deflated on a cement block outside the Bird's Nest stadium's security perimeter, a short walk from the growing lines of those holding valid tickets. His business partner from Chicago, Marisa Woehlert, who had travelled with him, stood nearby.
"The credit card company said I'll get the money back but so what? I already paid for the hotel and airfare. I came for the opening ceremony," Woehlert said.
Tens of thousands of those lucky enough to snag the sought-after tickets filed slowly but smoothly into the stadium, passing through tight security checks.
Opening ceremony tickets contain tags that hold the ticket-buyers' photos, passport numbers and other personal identifying details, which were to be compared by security officials at the entrance gates.