Justice Department Files Complaint Against California Ticket Broker for Using Unlawful Tactics to Purchase Millions of Tickets to Popular Live Events

Today, the Department of Justice, together with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), announced the filing of a complaint against REPS & Company Inc. (REPS), a California corporation, along with three of its executives — Ryan Pancheri, Brian Archibald, and Nicholas Totagrande — for violations of the FTC Act and the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, which prohibits circumventing the measures Internet ticket sellers use to ensure equitable consumer access to event tickets.

“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,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “Working alongside the FTC, we will continue to enforce the BOTS Act to protect consumers from such conduct.”

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, alleges that since 2022, the defendants have routinely circumvented ticket issuers’ controls to purchase tickets in excess of purchase limits for thousands of events. The defendants then resold tickets to these events on the secondary market. Defendants spent more than $1.3 billion to amass over 18.5 million tickets for these events and generated at least $120.8 million in profit.

The United States is represented by Assistant Director Marcus P. Smith and Trial Attorneys Meredith L. Reiter and Austin T. Mendes of the Civil Division’s Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch in coordination with the Federal Trade Commission.

The claims made in the complaint are allegations only, and there has been no determination of liability.