Sports fans who applied for Olympic tickets will find out tonight if they have been successful.
Payments are due to be taken out of bank accounts at midnight, but only for one in seven of the two million Britons who applied.
Those whose payments have bounced will be told and given until June 10 to move funds into their account.
All successful applicants will be told which Olympic events they have won tickets for by June 24, but until then, hopefuls will be watching their bank accounts nervously to see if any money has been withdrawn.
More than half of the 650 sessions were over-subscribed and many fans have already vented their ager after realising they’ve failed to get anything.
Those who have been left empty-handed will be given first choice of the remaining tickets within weeks.
In a third sale before Christmas, all the remaining tickets will be offered on a first-come-first –served basis.
Sports journalist James Toney applied for £3000 worth of tickets to maximise his chances but only £206 has been debited and he has only got four seats.
“For all Locog’s talk about affordability and accessibility, their ticketing strategy favours the more affluent and that cannot be right,” he said.
“Their system favours those who gamble big, applying for lots of popular tickets, in the hope of winning small.”
Last month it was revealed that a German website was selling tickets for popular events at the London Olympics.
While millions of Britons had entered a ballot for theirs, Dertour, a website endorsed by the International Olympic Committee, had been selling them to Europeans on its website since March, allowing them to bypass the ballot process.
Tickets for the men’s 200m final, in which Usain Bolt is expected to star and the men’s 1500m final were being sold for £132.
The firm said it had sold more than half of its allocation of around 50,000.
A critic of Britain’s lottery system for Olympic tickets, Joe Cohen, of ticket reseller Seatwave, said: “It has been designed to make things easier for LOCOG, not the people who want to go.”
But LOCOG said: “We didn’t make it first come, first served because we didn’t think that would be fair.”
Meanwhile, Sports Minister Hugh Robertson revealed that 6000 Olympic tickets are destined to be passed on to “domestic political and business leaders, dignitaries and others with a close connection to the Games”, while the other 3000 will be made available to Departmental staff who have worked on the Olympics.
Labour MP Ian Austin, who extracted the information from the Department through a Parliamentary Question, said, “why should ordinary families…have less chance of securing tickets than government officials?”
