Justice Department and FTC Sue Broker Accused of Evading Limits to Buy 18.5 Million Tickets

The Justice Department sued a California ticket broker and three of its executives on Thursday, accusing the company of running thousands of accounts to get around purchase limits and buy more than 18.5 million tickets to concerts and other live events, which it then resold for at least $120.8 million in profit.

The civil complaint, filed in federal court in the Southern District of California on a referral from the Federal Trade Commission, names REPS & Company Inc., a San Diego-based resale firm, along with its chief executive, Ryan Pancheri, its president, Brian Archibald, and its chief operating officer, Nicholas Totagrande. It accuses them of violating the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, known as the BOTS Act, as well as the FTC Act. The government is seeking a permanent injunction, a monetary judgment and civil penalties, according to the commission's case record, which lists the suit as civil action 26-cv-5895.

Since 2022, the agencies allege, REPS bought more than eight tickets to each of at least 83,500 events, many of them in high demand and likely to sell out. It spent more than $1.3 billion to amass the tickets and made at least $120.8 million reselling them on the secondary market, the Justice Department said.

For a single Beyoncé concert, the Oct. 1, 2023, Renaissance tour stop at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., REPS used about 1,300 accounts to buy 7,624 tickets and cleared roughly $833,000 reselling them, according to the FTC and The Hollywood Reporter. The purchase limit for that show was between four and eight tickets, Rolling Stone reported after obtaining the 22-page filing. In September 2024, the company allegedly used at least 700 accounts to buy 5,430 tickets to a Pitbull concert in Syracuse, N.Y., nearly a third of the capacity of the Empower Federal Credit Union Amphitheater, and made about $120,000 on them.

According to the FTC, ticket sellers such as Ticketmaster and AXS cap their quantity selectors at the purchase limit and check whether an order traces back to a verifiable account and a unique credit card, email address, phone number and IP address. REPS got around those checks, the agency alleges, with a team of employees, most of them in the Philippines, who bought through thousands of accounts created with names, addresses or phone numbers belonging to someone other than the buyer. The workers allegedly paid with virtual credit cards, used phone numbers the company controlled and hid who and where they were behind IP proxy services and multi-session browsers. When sellers blocked or canceled orders, the complaint says, REPS developed workarounds for its staff, such as making slight changes to an account holder's name or address, and the agency says internal company documents show REPS officials discussing tactics to make sure their accounts would not be blocked.

The law at the center of the case makes it illegal to "circumvent a security measure, access control system or other technological control or measure on an Internet website or online service that is used by the ticket issuer to enforce posted event ticket limits or to maintain the integrity of posted online ticket purchasing order rules," as the FTC quoted it. The agencies say the company's business model "is predicated on identifying events for which tickets will be in high demand and buy up tickets for those events before ordinary consumers can," The Hollywood Reporter reported, and the suit says the defendants' actions "injured consumers who otherwise may have been able to purchase those tickets in the first instance from ticket issuers at lower prices." The complaint says the tickets were resold at markups on StubHub, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, Gametime and Ticketmaster's own resale platform, according to Rolling Stone.

"The Justice Department is committed to holding accountable individuals and businesses that drive up the cost of event tickets by illegally exceeding ticket purchase limits and reselling those unlawfully obtained tickets with exorbitant markups," Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the department's Civil Division said in a statement. He said the department would keep enforcing the law alongside the FTC. Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said that "REPS' entire business model is focused on trying to game the ticket-purchasing system in order to obtain as many tickets as possible to resell at inflated prices to consumers," and he warned companies that profit by "depriving ordinary fans of access to reasonably priced tickets" that they "should be on notice that we are watching and will take action to stop this unlawful conduct."

The case follows an executive order President Trump signed on March 31, 2025, which directed the FTC to "rigorously enforce" the BOTS Act and told the attorney general and the commission to make sure competition laws are "appropriately enforced in the concert and entertainment industry." The order said ticket scalpers "use bots and other unfair means to acquire large quantities of face-value tickets and then re-sell them at an enormous markup on the secondary market."

The commission voted 2-0 to refer the complaint to the Justice Department, which filed it on the FTC's behalf, according to the agency. The Justice Department said the claims in the complaint are allegations only and that there has been no determination of liability, and the FTC noted that the court will decide the case. REPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hollywood Reporter, and Rolling Stone said its attempts to reach a company spokesperson on Thursday were not immediately successful.