A man who used Photoshop to make fake Disney tickets has been arrested for fraud, prosecutors in Minhang District said on Thursday.

They said he used the program to change the numbers on some expired e-tickets and sold them at half price to attract more customers.

When the date came near, he used new customers' money to book real tickets for the old ones with their personal information and had them enter the resort with their identity cards, which prevented his forged tickets from being noticed, prosecutors said.

They said that the man, Fan, had resigned from Shanghai Disney Resort and came up with the idea of being a Disney ticket scalper. He got some tickets from former colleagues at a lower price and made a profit of around 50 yuan (US$7.1)from each deal.

However, with a mortgage to pay, he was not satisfied at this small profit and, in December last year, changed the numbers on expired tickets using Photoshop and sold them at 100 to 200 yuan each.

Since most customers ordered tickets from him one or two months in advance, Fan had enough time to buy real tickets for them.

Fan told prosecutors he had to continue to do that as a lossmaker because he needed money for the house loan.

Later, Fan had several agents who bought tickets from him and then resold them. One of the agents purchased more than 6,000 fake tickets and still had 2,000 left when Fan ran out of money.

On May 1 this year, Fan cheated the agent by saying that Disney's ticketing system was updating. Fan asked him to buy tickets from Taobao.com and promised to pay him double later. However, after the agent bought tickets for more than 300,000 yuan, he lost contact with Fan.

Fan surrendered himself to police later the same month.