Soccer: Millions of World Cup ticket orders weeded out

Prospective 2006 soccer World Cup fans will have a slightly better chance of success in Friday's ticket draw after organisers uncovered attempts to buy millions of tickets using automatic ordering.

The 812,000 tickets on offer in the first two-month sales window were massively oversubscribed, with more than a million people around the world placing orders for 12.3 million tickets.

Illegal orders for several million tickets were detected, however, and those were all weeded out before the draw was started by the click of a mouse at 0800 GMT (8pm NZt) on Friday.

Organisers said one scam operated from the United States used a computer ordering system to try to buy over two million tickets.

"We were able to detect an obvious attempt at manipulation, " said World Cup organising committee vice-president Horst R. Schmidt.

A total of 900,000 orders for 8.7 million tickets were included in Friday's draw.

Fans will discover on April 22 whether their applications have been successful.

Organisers will put a further 300,000 tickets on the market to fans during subsequent sales windows.

- REUTERS