The U.S. Department of Justice, acting on an FTC referral, filed a federal lawsuit in San Diego against REPS & Company, Inc. and three executives, alleging the company used bot networks and thousands of fake accounts to buy 18.5 million event tickets in bulk and resell them for over $120 million in profit, violating the BOTS Act.
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Federal prosecutors have lodged a civil action against a San Diego-based firm and three of its officers, accusing them of deploying automated bot software to acquire large volumes of concert and sporting event tickets for resale at marked-up prices.
The civil action, filed Thursday in federal court in San Diego and brought by the Justice Department following a referral from the Federal Trade Commission, contends that REPS & Company Inc. generated in excess of $120 million through a ticket resale operation the government characterises as unlawful. No reply to a request for comment had been received from the Bay Ho-based firm by the end of Friday.
The civil complaint accuses the company of violating the Better Online Ticket Sales Act — commonly referred to as the BOTS Act — and describes a scheme in which thousands of accounts were created across Ticketmaster, AXS, and other ticketing platforms, with Virtual Private Networks and proxy IP addresses deployed alongside a Philippines-based team of purchasers to conceal the volume of transactions. The complaint further states that those methods allowed the defendants to circumvent the security and technological controls built into ticket issuers' websites and applications that would otherwise have prevented such bulk purchasing.
Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, stated in a release that the company's operations appeared oriented toward manipulating ticket-purchasing systems to acquire inventory for resale at above-market prices, and that businesses seeking to profit by reducing the availability of affordably priced tickets to consumers could expect regulatory attention and enforcement action.
The filing alleges that, over a period running from January 2022 through October 2025, the named defendants acquired large volumes of tickets through Ticketmaster and AXS, covering no fewer than 83,000 separate events.
According to the complaint, the defendants purchased roughly 18.5 million tickets across a range of live events — among them concerts, music festivals, professional and collegiate sports, stand-up comedy, Broadway productions, and touring theatre shows — at a total outlay exceeding $1.3 billion, before reselling those tickets on secondary platforms including StubHub, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, Gametime, Ticket Network, and Ticketmaster's own resale marketplace, where the markup applied generated a net profit the filing placed at no less than $120.8 million.
The complaint states that the defendants drew on roughly 1,300 separate Ticketmaster accounts to acquire 7,624 tickets for a Beyoncé performance at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City in October 2023 — a show whose per-buyer limit had been set at between four and eight tickets — and then resold that inventory for a net gain of approximately $833,323. In a separate instance cited in the filing, at least 700 accounts were used to obtain 5,430 tickets for a Pitbull show at a New York arena, a figure representing close to one-third of the venue's estimated 17,500-seat capacity, from which the defendants are alleged to have netted around $120,109.
Among the remedies pursued in the filing are financial damages, civil penalties, and a court order that would bar REPS from any further conduct found to breach the BOTS Act.