A fake Around the Bay race?

This is just weird.

What seems to be a fake Around the Bay 30K race in San Francisco reportedly (though unsurprisingly) didn’t happen over the weekend in the California city.

The website for what appears to be a scam in the city uses a strange mash-up of two popular, legitimate Canadian races: Around the Bay 30K’s name and logo, and photos and text from the Oasis Zoo Run website. The Zoo Run, held at the Toronto Zoo is a Canada Running Series event. All the photos on the website are of the Zoo Run and much of the text is lifted verbatim from the event’s website, minus contact information.

In a story about another series of scam races, the San Francisco Parks Department confirmed that the race did not happen. Similar scenarios aren’t unheard of. With the massive growth of road running, and mass participation events such as obstacle course races and colour runs, would-be race directors take registration money and entries from runners without getting approval from the city to host events. Often, these races end up shabbily thrown together, or don’t happen at all. In some instances, these scammer disappear with the money afterwards.

Some of the scams are so common race directors have made names for themselves almost from how good they’ve become at not hosting races. Dean Reinke, an American race director, was made infamous through a combination of his own terrible events and a scathing story about him in Outside.

The website shares an email, roundthebay@yahoo.com. with another website for the same event, roundthebay2.homestead.com. Homestead.com seems to be the company that sold the domain name in late March of this year. Unsurprisingly, trying to contact the email doesn’t get you very far. The phone number registered with the domain also isn’t a real phone number, being one digit short of a real San Francisco number. The name listed as the registrant of the domain doesn’t seem linked with any other legitimate races.

The second website – possibly an earlier development version of the other – seems to put even less effort into seeming to be its own race; aside from some minor changes, the page used photos from the real Around the Bay and photos from the late-winter race, runners clad in hats and gloves, a time of year when temperatures in San Francisco average in the 15-20 C range. Some sections of the site don’t even remove “Hamilton” from race descriptions.