FTC is suing ticket reseller for price gouging Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen concert tickets

The U.S. agency is suing a company that bought and resold thousands of in-demand event tickets, including to Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen concerts.

On Monday, the FTC filed a complaint claiming that Key Investment Group used illegal tactics to bypass Ticketmaster’s ticket limit protections, violating the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. The complaint alleged that the seller purchased hundreds of thousands of tickets and scalped them for millions in profit.

The Maryland-based company, which has operated under Epic Seats, TotalTickets.com, and Totally Tix, used “thousands of fictitious Ticketmaster accounts” and proxy IP addresses to purchase at least 379,776 tickets in just over a year at a cost of nearly $57 million, the complaint said. The company then resold a portion of those tickets at a significant markup for approximately $64 million, according to the FTC. 

Ticket sales included concerts, plays, sporting events, and most notably, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Bruce Springsteen’s show at MetLife $MET Stadium. The complaint alleged Key Investment Group purchased a total of 2,280 Taylor Swift tickets, netting $1.2 million in revenue, and a total of 1,530 Bruce Springsteen tickets, netting $20,900 in revenue.

The lawsuit is part of President Trump’s recent crackdown on ticket resellers, following the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit to break up Ticketmaster and Live Nation and public claims of mishandled ticket sales for Swift’s Eras Tour. In March, Trump signed an executive order to enforce the BOTS Act, a 2016 law that made it illegal for companies to use bots to purchase a large number of tickets to sell at markups. 

“President Trump made it clear in his March executive order that unscrupulous middlemen who harm fans and jack up prices through anticompetitive methods will hear from us,” FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. “Today’s action puts brokers on notice that the Trump-Vance FTC will police operations that unlawfully circumvent ticket sellers’ purchase limits, ensuring that consumers have an opportunity to buy tickets at fair prices.”