Ticketmaster vows crackdown on scalper accounts that buy up most tickets

Ticketmaster, the world’s largest online box office, is promising for the first time to crack down on industrial-scale scalpers to bar them from using hundreds — sometimes thousands — of fake Ticketmaster accounts to buy up and resell tickets for concerts, theatre and sporting events.

The move, announced in a letter to U.S. lawmakers late last week, comes after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit in September. The multimillion-dollar suit accuses Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, of "illegal ticket resale tactics" and "deceiving artists and consumers about price and ticket limits."

The FTC lawsuit unearthed internal Ticketmaster documents showing, for example, that in 2018, five brokers controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed 246,407 concert tickets to 2,594 events.