CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – State Attorney General Jason Miyares has joined Virginia among seven states and the Federal Trade Commission in a lawsuit filed against Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Ticketmaster LLC, for violating consumer protection laws and driving up ticket prices for Virgnia consumers. They allege Ticketmaster “routinely allowed brokers to circumvent its security measures and exceed set ticket limits for consumers”.
The suit maintains “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.”
Attorney General Miyares and the rest are seeking a preliminary injunction in addition to other consumer relief in an effort to enforce the Better Online Tickets Sales (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.”
In a statement, Miyares said Virginians deserve a chance to purchase tickets at price that are not illegally inflated.
“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,” Miyares said.
Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Utah are the other states joining Virginia and the FTC in the suit.
Click here to read the entire suit.
