The Federal Trade Commission is suing a ticket broker for allegedly using “illegal means” to buy up hundreds of thousands of live event tickets, including for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Key Investment Group, which also does business as Epic Seats, TotalTickets.com, and Totally Tix, is accused of violating the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act by using virtual and traditional credit card numbers, along with spoofed IP addresses, fake accounts it paid real people to make, and banks of SIM cards used to receive verification texts to numbers it controlled, to get around security protections.
Key Investment Group then allegedly resold these tickets on secondary ticket-selling sites and Ticketmaster’s resale platform to people who couldn’t beat its alleged army of accounts to buy them directly. The FTC’s lawsuit is part of a broader clampdown on live event ticket sellers in the US.
In the lawsuit filed on Monday, the FTC claims Key Investment Group bought $57 million worth of tickets from Ticketmaster in just over one year, while reselling them at a “significant markup” for $64 million. The reseller allegedly purchased 2,280 of Swift’s Eras Tour tickets from March to August 2023 for nearly $745,000 and resold them for around $1.9 million. During this time, the FTC claims Key Investment Group used 49 accounts to buy 273 tickets to Taylor Swift’s March 25th concert at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas in 2023, “dramatically exceeding” the six-ticket limit.
Key Investment Group refutes the lawsuit in a statement released on Monday, saying the FTC has “twisted the intent” of the BOTS Act and is using it as a “weapon” targeting business and consumers. “Under the FTC’s interpretation, anyone who purchases more than four tickets or uses more than one account could be deemed in violation of federal law,” Key Investment Group claims. “The FTC misleadingly characterizes KIG’s [Key Investment Group] use of standard internet browsers to purchase tickets as equivalent to deploying unlawful software.”