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Federal officials announced on Friday that three New York City ticket brokers had agreed to pay $ 3.7 million in civil penalties to settle allegations that they purchased tens of thousands of event tickets and resold them to customers at inflated prices.
The companies – Just in Time Tickets, Concert Specials and Cartisim Corp., all from Long Island – have been accused of violating the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, which aims to prevent brokers from bypassing set ticket purchase limits. by online ticket sellers like Ticketmaster. It also prevents the resale of tickets obtained by knowingly engaging in such practices.
The regulations are the first enforcement action the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission initiated under the law enacted in 2016.
“Those who break the BOTS law are deceiving fans by forcing them to pay exorbitant prices to attend concerts, theatrical performances and sporting events,” said Seth D. DuCharme, the interim US attorney for the Eastern District of New York. York, in a statement. “This office will spare no effort to ban deceptive practices that harm consumers.”
Lawsuits against the three companies, brought by federal prosecutors on Long Island, had accused brokers of reselling thousands of illegally obtained tickets for millions of dollars in revenue between Jan. 1, 2017 and today, often to significant increases.
The companies are accused of creating accounts in the name of fictitious family, friends and individuals and of using hundreds of credit cards to grab top seats at sporting events and concerts.
They are also accused of using ticket robots, or automated software, to evade safeguards designed to prohibit non-human ticket purchases and to conceal the IP addresses of the computers they used.
All three companies faced higher civil penalties as part of the settlement, with Concert Specials agreeing to pay the larger settlement of $ 16 million. But each was released from paying full penalties if they agreed to pay amounts ranging from $ 1.64 million to $ 499,000 and meet certain additional conditions, including submitting compliance reports to the government.
The New York attorney general’s office had previously reached deals worth $ 2.76 million in 2016 with six ticket brokers, following report revealing widespread abuse in the ticketing industry At New York. The report found that bots were widely used, with a high-tech scalper buying more than 1,000 tickets in less than a minute for a U2 show at Madison Square Garden.
Resale brokers must be licensed by the state, but the report reveals that many do not.
A lawyer who represented the three companies declined a request for comment.
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