Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has joined the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a bipartisan coalition of six other state attorneys general in a lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its parent entity, Live Nation Entertainment, over their alleged ticket scalping scheme that has locked out fans and driven up prices.

The lawsuit, filed in the Central District of California, alleges that Ticketmaster knew that numerous ticket brokers circumvented ticket purchasing limits on the Ticketmaster website, buying thousands of tickets above the set limit and boxing out ordinary fans. These brokers used methods like creating hundreds of bogus Ticketmaster accounts and using software to log into many accounts at once while using proxy IP addresses to hide their location. Despite knowing this, Ticketmaster turned a blind eye to and, in some cases, aided these brokers and then re-sold the tickets at highly inflated prices on Ticketmaster’s resale platform—a violation of the federal Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act), which was specifically passed into law to put a stop to these types of ploys. The complaint further alleges that Ticketmaster violated the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act by deceptively representing to consumers that ticket limits existed and were enforced when such was not the case for these brokers. 

“Tennessee wouldn’t be Tennessee without world-class live music from the mountains to the Mississippi. When consumers line up for a show, they should never have to compete with armies of scalpers scooping up hundreds of tickets at a time,” said Attorney General Skrmetti. “We’re fighting to level the playing field and get tickets back into the hands of real fans at fair prices.”

The coalition is seeking injunctive relief to stop these practices and monetary relief to compensate harmed consumers.

Tennessee joins the FTC and the attorneys general from Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Utah, and Virginia in filing this suit.