FTC Lawsuit Slams Ticketmaster Alleging It Bilked Consumers For Billions Of Dollars
Tired of high ticket prices with exorbitant fees adding to the cost? So is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which alleges in a lawsuit filed with seven states that Ticketmaster and its parent firm Live Nation essentially colluded with brokers by turning a blind eye to illegal harvesting of hordes of tickets, which were then resold at a "substantial markup in the secondary market." The lawsuit comes five months after the FTC sued Uber over allegations of deceptive billing and cancellation issues.
The result of the alleged Ticketmaster scheme is that consumers ended up paying way above the face value for tickets, according to the FTC. In addition, the FTC claims Ticketmaster and Live Nation deceived both artists and consumers with bait-and-switch pricing by way of advertising ticket prices that were below what consumers actually had to pay.
"[Ticketmaster and Live Nation] deceptively claimed to impose strict limits on the number of tickets that consumers could purchase for an event, even though ticket brokers routinely and substantially exceeded those limits; and sold millions of tickets, often at much higher cost to consumers, on its resale platform that those brokers obtained in excess of artists’ ticket limits," the FTC states.
FTC acknowledges that Ticketmaster has security measures in place to thwart such behavior, but alleges it knowingly allowed brokers to bypass those measures by creating thousands of Ticketmaster accounts and using proxy IP addresses to purchases tickets in bulk.
According to the FTC, even though Ticketmaster knew this was happening, it still allowed brokers to resell tickets on its platform and then profited from related fees and markups.
"In fact, a senior Ticketmaster executive admitted in an internal email that copied Live Nation leadership, that the companies 'turn a blind eye as a matter of policy' to brokers’ violations of posted ticket limits. For example, an internal review showed that just five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed 246,407 concert tickets to 2,594 events," the FTC states.
On top of it all, FTC says Ticketmaster and Live Nation provided tech support to brokers through a platform called TradeDesk. The platform helps brokers track and aggregate tickets purchased from multiple Ticketmaster accounts with a single interface that makes it easier to manage resells.
Instead of doing that, the FTC insinuates that Ticketmaster should have been using TradeDesk to identify and put a stop to high-volume brokers who routinely exceeded ticket limits with hundreds and sometimes thousands of separate accounts.
"In addition, Ticketmaster deceived the American people by advertising list prices for tickets that were substantially lower than the actual cost consumers paid after fees and markups were added," the FTC states in a press release.
FTC claims Ticketmaster hid mandatory fees that sometimes as high as 44% of the cost of the ticket, fees that were never shown until the last step of the transaction. Collectively, it's said those fees added p to $16.4 billion from 2019-2024.
In its lawsuit (PDF), the FTC is seeking an unspecified amount in civil penalties plus any additional monetary relief deemed appropriate by the court.
Top Image Source: Pixabay
