Moscow, May 27 (IANS) Russian football authorities have been cracking down on ticket touts of the Euro 2012 football tournament and illegal supplies are being cut off, a senior football official said Sunday.
Russian Football Union President Sergei Fursenko told local media that the authorities have taken effective measures to fight against ticket touting, leaving the touts "almost no tickets to sell" now.
"We've tried to buy tickets from touts and we bought only two tickets in one place. That means that we've taken effective action," RIA Novosti quoted Fursenko as saying.
Organizers of the games said previously that the ticket designers have adopted several new security features to prevent counterfeiting. Hologram and unique identification code are used to prevent ticket fraud, while stewards in the stadiums will know five or six other signs of authenticity, reported Xinhua.
The tickets were printed in Portugal and Austria in April. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) sold through its website a total of 500,000 tickets for the matches at the prices ranging from 30 to 600 euro.
The rest 900,000 tickets have been distributed to national federations, sponsors, UEFA guests and business package buyers.
Euro 2012, to run June 8-July 1, will be co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland in the two countries' eight cities. The matches will be played in Poland's Warsaw, Wroclaw, Poznan, Gdansk and Ukraine's Kiev, Lvov, Kharkov and Donetsk.