The Shadow
RICHMOND, Va. – Attorney General Jason Miyares today announced that Virginia has joined the Federal Trade Commission and a bipartisan 7-state coalition in filing a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiary, Ticketmaster LLC, for violating consumer protection laws and driving up ticket prices for Virginia consumers.
“Virginians deserve access to tickets at reasonable prices. All too often, however, those tickets are snatched up by bots and brokers for resale, forcing Virginians to pay substantially higher prices for the entertainment they love. Ticketmaster should be preventing this conduct, not enabling it by turning a blind eye to brokers’ illegal ticket harvesting and reselling the tickets for even more profit,” said Attorney General Jason Miyares. “Virginia consumers deserve a chance to purchase tickets at prices that are not illegally inflated.”
The coalition seeks to enforce the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act), which prohibits circumventing an online ticket seller’s security measures when purchasing tickets from the seller’s online platform and makes it unlawful “to sell or offer to sell any event ticket” if the seller “participated directly in or had the ability to control the conduct” circumventing those measures “or knew or should have known that the event ticket was acquired in violation” of the BOTS Act.
The coalition alleges that Ticketmaster routinely allowed brokers to circumvent its security measures and exceed set ticket limits for consumers. Some brokers allegedly created hundreds to thousands of fake accounts to buy up tickets, which Ticketmaster then resold on its own secondary marketplace, generating massive profits for both the brokers and Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster’s TradeDesk platform facilitates resales by high-volume brokers by enabling them to aggregate tickets purchased from multiple Ticketmaster accounts. To stop this conduct, Attorney General Miyares is seeking a permanent injunction in addition to other consumer relief.
Attorney General Miyares previously sued Ticketmaster and Live Nation for allegedly violating antitrust laws through a range of separate anticompetitive practices in an effort to control the live entertainment industry.
Virginia is joined in this lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Utah.
Read the lawsuit here.
