RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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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.
The FTC said Elite Events bought more than 1,000 tickets for various stops of Boone’s 2024 Fireworks and Rollerblades Tour and nearly 1,600 tickets for Moroney’s 2025 Am I Okay? Tour . The company was also accused of purchasing almost 300 tickets to a single Metallica show during the band’s 2025 M72 World Tour and more than 400 tickets for one stop of McRae’s Miss Possessive Tour the same year.
“As a result of the shortages exacerbated by defendants and other ticket scalpers, tickets to McRae’s Miss Possessive tour concerts were sold out by February 2025 and many concertgoers had to resort to the secondary marketplace to purchase tickets at often twice or three times the original sale price from Ticketmaster,” reads the complaint.
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Christopher Mufarrige , director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a Monday statement, “Consumers should be able to purchase tickets to events without having to contend with bad actors who drive up prices and make it harder for fans to see their favorite artists and athletes.”
An attorney for Elite Events did not immediately return a request for comment. The company neither admitted nor denied any wrongdoing in the settlement.
The case against Elite Events is just the latest example of the FTC’s new focus on the BOTS Act, which became law in 2016 but was rarely enforced in its first decade of existence. That changed last year, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order explicitly instructing the agency to go after ticket resellers using the statute.
The FTC followed orders, bringing two high-profile BOTS Act lawsuits in 2025. One accused broker Key Investment Group of using fake Ticketmaster accounts to flip tickets for Taylor Swift ’s record-breaking Eras Tour. The other targeted Ticketmaster itself , alleging the Live Nation-owned ticketing giant had failed to adequately police broker misconduct.
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