City officials are tightening the distribution of Olympic host-city pins after councillors received some suspicious requests from people claiming to be Olympic enthusiasts.

While there were some legitimate requests, others were apparently opportunists, said Sven Bueman, Vancouver's chief of protocol.

"We took a look at about three of these letters and suddenly realized that even though they came from different cities, they all had exactly the same font, the same size of font, the same style, the same sentencing."

And there was something suspicious about the names, said Bueman, who took the letters to city clerk Syd Baxter.

"I hammered them into Google and it came back with a movie listing — one of those sites that show all the details of a movie — and there was Field of Dreams and the two names were two characters out of that movie," Baxter said.

He then checked eBay, the internet sales portal, where he found several of the hard-to-find pins were already listed for sale for as much as $15 apiece.

Bueman has now issued a memo to all councillors, telling them that all requests for Olympic pins go through him. And he's no longer responding to requests by e-mail.

Vancouver is hosting the Winter Olympics in 2010.