New York AG Settles With Brokers Over Illegal Bot Use to Buy Up Large Amounts of Tickets

Six ticket brokers that illegally bought and resold hundreds of thousands of event tickets in New York since 2011 -- including five that used illegal software to buy tickets from sites like Ticketmaster.com -- settled for a combined $4.19 million, said Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a Thursday news release. He said the five companies that used the bots, which became illegal in November, were: Renaissance Ventures known as Prestige Entertainment, Ebrani Corp. known as Presidential Tickets, Concert Specials, Fanfetch and BMC Capital Partners. Except for BMC, the four companies and JAL Enterprises doing business as Top Star Tickets also sold tickets without first getting the state license, said the AG. Under the settlement, the companies must get the proper licenses and "abstain" from using bots, which scoop up large amounts of tickets from ticket sellers before they can be bought by consumers. Brokers then usually sell those tickets at higher prices to consumers. The release said Prestige Entertainment used a ticket bot in 2014 to buy 1,012 U2 concert tickets in one minute. Similar federal legislation became law in December (see 1612150021). Schneiderman said the state settled with Componica, which developed "software libraries" used by ticket bots to bypass "CAPTCHA" tests that websites use to determine if a user is human or a bot. The company agreed not to develop or use such software. The companies didn't comment or their contact information couldn't be located.