Ticketmaster is under fire again, this time by the FTC, which has accused the ticketing giant of turning a blind eye while scalpers gouge fans and then trying to twist President Trump’s ticket reform push into a scheme to grab even more power.
Live Nation-Ticketmaster is already facing a massive lawsuit from the DOJ and 40 states for running what critics call a monopoly that hurts consumers, artists, and venues. Now, the FTC says Ticketmaster may have knowingly let scalpers scoop up hundreds of thousands of tickets using bots and fake accounts — locking regular fans out of face-value seats and forcing them to pay sky-high resale prices.
The FTC complaint accuses the company of working with scalpers, as NBC reported:
….in the latest complaint, the FTC includes a slide from an internal Ticketmaster presentation from 2018 that suggests the company was weighing the economic impact of imposing stricter purchasing caps that would curb bots but potentially hurt its finances. On a page labeled “evaluating potential actions” a data table is shown under the heading “serious negative economic impact if we move to 8 ticket limit across the board.”
It also includes an email from one of the defendants in which he “owns up” to having exceeded the ticket-purchase limit for a May 2024 Bad Bunny show in Miami and offers to have the orders canceled, to which a Ticketmaster rep simply responds that “as long as the purchases were made using different accounts and cards, it’s within the guidelines.”
This isn’t the first time Ticketmaster has been accused of getting in bed with scalpers.
In 2018, an undercover CBC and Toronto Star investigation allegedly caught Ticketmaster recruiting professional scalpers at an industry convention in Las Vegas to “cheat its own system” and expand its resale business. Ticketmaster denied the report as “categorically untrue.”
Now, instead of cracking down on bots like Trump has demanded, Ticketmaster is lobbying for a new scheme that critics say would kill off its competition and tighten its monopoly.
In March, President Trump signed an executive order directing Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to to clean up the live event marketplace and go after the bots that cheat consumers out of buying tickets. But rather than pledge to fix the problem on its own platform, Ticketmaster floated the idea of government-imposed price caps on resale tickets.
Trump allies called the company’s plan a blatant power grab that would crush Ticketmaster’s rivals and leave fans getting ripped off worse than ever.
Former congressman Matt Gaetz slammed Ticketmaster’s idea, calling it “more monopoly smoke and mirrors.”
“Far from helping fans, Ticketmaster’s rent-seeking proposal would only help Ticketmaster kill off resale competitors so it can jack up fees and rig the deck against consumers even more,” he said.
Brian Pandya, a former Deputy Associate Attorney General for the Trump administration, concurred with Gaetz, warning that Ticketmaster’s price cap plan would crush its rivals, making consumers nearly wholly dependent on the alleged monopoly.
Pandya said that, because Ticketmaster is in bed with price-gouging bots, consumers depend on resale platforms to get tickets to their favorite shows. But once price caps bankrupt the company’s competition, Tickemaster “would be left with even greater leverage—the opposite of what the DOJ and the 40 states that are party to this antitrust suit allege is needed to restore competition.”
Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk has also come out in opposition to Ticketmaster’s resale price cap proposal, urging the Trump administration to fix the Ticketmaster’s bot issue instead.
Trump’s team at DOJ, FTC, and Treasury will roll out a ticket reform plan in the coming months. Fans will see then if Ticketmaster finally gets reined in.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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