Federal officials announced Friday that three New York ticket brokers have agreed to pay $ 3.7 million in civil fines to settle allegations that they bought tens of thousands of opportunity tickets and sell them to customers at high prices.
The companies – Just in Time Tickets, Concert Specials and Cartisim Corp., all from Long Island – are accused of violating the law on better online ticket sales, which is aimed at preventing brokers from limiting the purchase of tickets such as by online ticket sellers, such as Cardmaster. It also prevents the resale of tickets obtained by knowingly participating in such practices.
The settlements are the first enforcement actions instituted by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission under the law enacted in 2016.
“Those who violate the BOTS Act deceive fans by forcing them to pay high prices to attend concerts, theater performances, and sporting events,” said Seth D. DuCharme, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. said a statement. “This office will spare no effort to ban misleading practices that harm consumers.”
The lawsuits against the three companies, filed by federal prosecutors on Long Island, accused the brokers of reselling thousands of illegally obtained tickets for millions of dollars in revenue between January 1, 2017 and the current day, often against significant remarks .
The companies are accused of drawing up accounts in the names of family members, friends and fictitious individuals and using hundreds of credit cards to take the best seats at sporting events and concerts.
They are also accused of using ticket bots, or automated software, to evade protection measures designed to ban non-human ticket purchases and to conceal the IP addresses of the computers they use.
The three companies assessed higher civil fines as part of the settlement, and Concert Specials agreed to pay the largest settlement of $ 16 million. But each was exempted from paying the full fines if they agreed to pay amounts of $ 1.64 million to $ 499,000 and to meet certain additional conditions, including submitting compliance reports to the government.
The New York Attorney General’s Office previously reached $ 2.76 million settlements in 2016 with six ticket brokers, following a report that exposed widespread abuse in the New York ticket industry. The report found that collisions were widely used, and one high-tech scale worker bought more than 1,000 tickets for a U2 show in Madison Square Garden in less than a minute.
Resale brokers must have a license from the state, but the report found that many do not.
An attorney representing the three companies declined a request for comment.