A ticket broker has settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for allegedly using international agents and proxy servers to buy up more than 100,000 concert tickets for artists including Tate McRae, Megan Moroney, Benson Boone and Metallica.
The FTC announced on Monday (July 27) that it’s resolved an investigation into Georgia-based Elite Events, doing business as smartscalpers.com. The settlement, reviewed and first reported by Billboard, calls for a total penalty of $10.7 million. However, the FTC is allowing Elite Events to satisfy the judgment by paying only $300,000 due to the company’s lack of current financial resources.
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The agency accused Elite Events of violating the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, a 2016 federal law that makes it illegal to circumvent any security measure put in place by a ticket issuer. The FTC claimed Elite Events’ entire business model was predicated on bypassing ticket sale limits on Ticketmaster and AXS, which aim to crack down on large-scale brokers by capping the number of tickets each user can purchase per show.
According to a civil complaint, Elite Events hired overseas employees to serve as ticket “pullers” and instructed these individuals to mask their identities with fake email addresses, virtual credit cards and proxy IP servers. The company allegedly amassed over 100,000 tickets to nearly 6,000 events between 2022 and now, then resold them at a “significant mark-up” on sites like StubHub, Vivid Seats and SeatGeek.
