The Bot in the Queue: Ten Years of the BOTS Act, $4 Million Payable

In the nearly ten years since Congress banned ticket bots, the federal government has been owed about $4 million under the law. In October, the FTC accused a single San Diego broker of making $120.8 million.

That broker, REPS & Company, allegedly bought more than 18.5 million tickets for at least 83,500 events, according to the FTC's October 2026 complaint. Eleven days later, Garth Brooks cancelled a Kansas City matinee outright. More than 90,000 had joined the queue, and his team said "most of that number turned out to be bots," as reported by the Express Tribune.

The Better Online Ticket Sales Act was signed on December 14, 2016. A decade on, artists are still delaying and cancelling on-sales over bots. The reason is mostly arithmetic.

The Numbers

Seven federal BOTS Act cases have been filed, on five dates. As of April 2025, the FTC's own guidance said only three had ever been brought, all on one day in January 2021. Nothing came in 2017, 2018, 2019 or 2020. Nothing came again until August 2025.

Four of the seven have been resolved, and the gap between what a court ordered and what a defendant actually has to pay is the first number that matters.

The rest was suspended because the defendants said they couldn't pay. The FTC's 2021 announcement put the first three at "more than $31 million" in judgments and "over $3.7 million" paid. The FTC's July 2026 release assessed Elite Events, which traded as "Smart Scalpers," more than $10.7 million and set $300,000 of it as payable.

The REPS figure is an allegation in a pending case. The payable total is $4,007,333.

The other three cases are pending, with no penalty set. One is against Key Investment Group, which the FTC says bought 379,776 tickets for nearly $57 million and took in about $64 million in resale revenue. One is against Live Nation and Ticketmaster themselves, filed in September 2025 with seven states. The third is REPS.

On paper the penalty is not small. Each violation can cost $53,088, the level the FTC set in January 2025 and left unchanged for 2026. Bloomberg Law reported that the exposure in the Live Nation case could run to billions. None of the four resolved cases came close to that.

Meanwhile, by Ticketmaster's own count, the traffic it is fighting has grown about fifteenfold. These figures come from Live Nation's written Senate Commerce testimony in January 2026, and nobody outside the company audits them.

The same testimony describes up to 25 million account sign-up attempts a day, 99.7% of them rejected. Attempt counts rise when detection gets better as well as when attacks get worse, so this table measures the fight, not the share of buyers who are fake. The figure most often quoted for that share is about 40% of ticketing traffic, from Distil Networks data collected in late 2018 and from the waiting-room company Queue-it, which puts it at 60% to 90% during popular on-sales. Both sell bot protection.

Why the Penalty Doesn't Bite

Start with the margin. In the KIG case, the FTC alleges 49 accounts were used to buy 273 tickets to one Taylor Swift Eras Tour show that carried a six-ticket limit. Across 38 Eras shows, KIG's 2,280 tickets reportedly cost $744,970 and resold for $1,961,980, a profit of $1,217,010, according to Hypebot's account of the complaint.

The margin exists because artists and promoters price below what the room would pay, and brokers collect the difference. Economists have studied this for two decades. Leslie and Sorensen's study of 103 rock concerts, published in the Review of Economic Studies and presented at the FTC, found resale made allocation about 5% more efficient, then lost roughly a third of that gain to rent-seeking and transaction costs. Courty's 2003 paper asked why promoters leave that money on the table at all. Live Nation's chief executive has described bot operators as "a professional, $12 billion business trying to capture seats," per Music Business Worldwide.

Set a margin that size against a judgment that gets suspended, and the outcome is predictable. Elite Events was assessed $10.7 million and pays $300,000. The Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator estimates the company's profits at $3.5 million. Two of the three 2021 defendants had already settled with the New York Attorney General over bots before the federal cases were filed: Just In Time Tickets for $300,000 in 2016, Concert Specials for $480,000 in 2017.

The word "bot" undersells it

The operations in the federal complaints look less like a script and more like a staffing agency. Live Nation's Senate testimony lists the toolkit: "automated purchase scripts that can complete the process of buying a ticket much faster than any human," proxies "that mask a user's true IP address and location," technology "that permit[s] multiple accounts to be created, hidden and used at scale," and payment platforms "that generate multiple virtual credit card numbers and billing addresses." The FTC's KIG announcement adds SIM boxes to catch verification codes.

The REPS complaint describes accounts held in other people's names under "power of attorney" agreements, an average of 19 accounts per person and as many as 40, an operating team mostly in the Philippines, and conduct running since 2022. One example: 7,624 tickets to Beyoncé at Arrowhead Stadium on October 1, 2023, bought through at least 1,300 accounts, for approximately $833,323 in profit. REPS says it uses "real people, using real accounts," according to TicketNews.

That defense has already failed once. In April 2026, a federal judge in Maryland refused to dismiss the KIG case, holding that the Act "unambiguously applies to 'any person' and not just to 'bots,'" as Digital Music News reported. The law was drafted broadly enough. It just went almost unused.

Who tells the FTC

Enforcement depends on evidence, and the evidence sits mostly with the ticketing platforms. At a January 2023 Senate Judiciary hearing, Live Nation president Joe Berchtold confirmed that the company had reported one bot incident to the FTC since 2019, according to The Record. One report in roughly four years, from a company that now says it blocks hundreds of millions of attempts a day.

The FTC's case against Live Nation goes further. The complaint's announcement alleges that five brokers held 6,345 accounts and 246,407 tickets. It quotes an executive saying the company would "turn a blind eye as a matter of policy" to broker limit violations. It says Ticketmaster rejected third-party identity verification in 2021 as "too effective." TicketNews reports that the same complaint reproduces a 2018 internal document showing REPS, then already, controlling 1,074 accounts and 102,968 tickets.

The incentive the FTC is pointing at is simple. A ticketer that also runs resale can collect fees twice on a flipped ticket. A 2018 CBC hidden-camera investigation put a number on it: $25.75 in fees on a $209.50 sale, and about $76 more if the ticket resold at $400. Ticketmaster called that reporting "categorically untrue."

Live Nation denies the FTC's allegations too. In October 2025 it called collusion claims "categorically false," said resale is about 3% of its revenue, and announced one account per broker verified by Social Security or tax ID, according to Music Business Worldwide. It says it has spent more than $1 billion on anti-scalping since 2010, and its answer to the suit argues the FTC is trying to "flip the Act on its head" in a way that would chill abuse prevention, MBW reported. On September 28, 2026, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong denied the company's motion to dismiss on every claim, writing that the Act "does not preclude platforms from facing liability," per Pollstar. That ruling finds nothing proven. It lets the case go forward, and the FTC has proposed a jury trial in April 2028, according to TicketNews. The broader antitrust case against the company is its own story, covered in Who Owns the Room.

One October, Three On-Sales

London. RAYE's presale at the Royal Albert Hall drew 1.8 million sign-ups for about 5,000 seats. "Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations," she said, as reported by Music Business Worldwide. The Hall's site then took 5 million access requests and fans couldn't buy for 45 minutes, by that outlet's account. The "hundreds of thousands" is her estimate. Nobody independent has counted.

Kansas City. Brooks had added a November 7 matinee at T-Mobile Center, at $155 plus taxes, according to TicketNews. Sales were halted on October 23. "The bot situation is out of hand," Brooks said. "It's been progressively getting worse on this tour," per KCTV5. Earlier on the same tour, Salt Lake City queues topped 50,000 a show with more than 90% verified as human, TicketNews reported. In Kansas City, the team concluded most of 90,000 were not, and cancelled rather than sell to them. AXS, the ticketer, has not commented.

Newcastle. Sam Fender's presale for St James' Park was pushed from October 28 to October 29 after a "sophisticated bot attack," reported Music Week. No count was given.

Earlier in the year, Ticketmaster said it had caught scalpers holding "thousands" of tickets to Harry Styles's 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, bought with "multiple accounts and fake identities," and resold them at face value, per Pollstar. When NPR revisited the episode in October, it quoted Jack Antonoff's reply to the company: "you caught you?"

A Law That Exists Elsewhere, Too

The United States is not unusual in having a bot law that has barely been used. Britain made using bots to beat ticket limits a criminal offence in July 2018, under regulations with no stated cap on the fine in England and Wales. According to a government answer to a written parliamentary question in July 2025, mirrored by Westminster Brief, there had been no recorded prosecutions.

Britain did jail touts. It used fraud law. Peter Hunter and David Smith of BZZ Ltd spent about £4 million on tickets and took in more than £10.8 million, using software including a "Spinner Bot," according to the Court of Appeal judgment that upheld their convictions. Hunter got four years. In 2024, four people behind TQ Tickets were sentenced for buying 47,000 tickets through more than 100 identities, as STV reported.

The EU rule, added to the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, targets the resale of bot-bought tickets rather than the use of the bot. Western Australia's only reported prosecution, in November 2024, was a resale case, not a bot case, and ended in a A$2,000 fine. Ontario's 2026 penalties against SeatGeek were for breaching its resale rules, not for bots, per BNN Bloomberg.

The Complication

The strongest case against this story is that bots are not why most fans miss out. The New York Attorney General's 2016 report, Obstructed View, found that only about 46% of tickets to top New York shows reached the general public on-sale. About 16% were held for insiders and 38% went to presales. For one Katy Perry show at Barclays in 2014, about 12% went to the public. Scarcity was built in before any bot showed up. The same report also found one bot bought 1,012 U2 tickets at Madison Square Garden in a single minute, and 520 Beyoncé tickets at Barclays Center went in three minutes, so both things were true at once.

Holdbacks aren't new either. Records from Bruce Springsteen's 2009 New Jersey shows showed thousands of seats held for the band, the label, sponsors and staff, a count the venue authority disputed as preliminary, per TicketNews.

Underpricing is a choice, and the industry is unmaking it. Alan Krueger found in 2002 that concert prices had risen about 61% over five years against 13% inflation and suggested tickets "were priced too low to begin with," as Princeton summarized. Tiered and platinum pricing now capture part of the spread brokers used to keep. For the Oasis reunion, Britain's competition regulator found standing tickets sold at two price levels, the higher released after the lower sold out, and some "platinum" tickets at almost 2.5 times standard, according to the CMA. If artists keep pricing closer to market, the broker margin shrinks with no enforcement at all.

Much resale also clears at or below face. A trade group of ticketing professionals says about 40% of secondary tickets do, per TicketNews. A resale-industry study claimed $414 million in fan savings for 2024 across 186,113 transactions, with 62% of events seeing resale below the box office, TicketNews reported, though its own category figures don't add up to the total. Both can sit beside high average markups if a minority of big shows carry the premium.

The best-known cost estimate is soft. Vanderbilt's $11.3 billion a year combines $4.5 billion in resale markups and $6.8 billion in fees above a 10% benchmark. TicketNews pointed out that the markup inputs date from 2004 and 2010 to 2014, and that the fee figure "is not an independently measured amount." It also noted that "None of those limitations establishes that ticket resale markups or ticketing fees are insignificant."

And enforcement may finally be starting. Four of the seven federal cases came in the 19 months after a March 2025 executive order told the FTC to "rigorously enforce" the Act. California banned speculative "ghost" tickets and limit-dodging software in September, with misdemeanor penalties, according to CalMatters. Ticketmaster says fewer than 5% of Eras Tour tickets sold through Verified Fan were resold or listed, against a typical 20% to 30% without it, per the company's own account. That claim is unaudited, and the 2026 Styles scalpers got past it anyway.

The weakest part of the thesis is the AI. RAYE's "hundreds of thousands" is her estimate. Brooks's "most" is his team's word. The headline figure from Thales, that "AI-driven bot attacks surged 12.5x," covers all web traffic, not tickets, and comes from a company that sells bot defense. Nobody has independently measured whether bot share at on-sales has risen since 2016. The visible wave may partly be better detection and more artists willing to say so out loud.

None of that changes the ledger, though. Elite Events pays $300,000 on a $10.7 million judgment. REPS allegedly made $120.8 million before anyone sued it. Whether the failure belongs to regulators, to the platforms, or to both, the arithmetic comes out the same.

What This Means for Fans

A ticket listed for sale before the on-sale even opens may be a speculative listing the seller doesn't own yet. California now bans that. Treat an early listing as a promise, not a ticket.

Identity-linked presales have the most data behind them, even if the data is Ticketmaster's. Register for the artist's verified presale when there is one, and use the account you'll actually attend with.

If you can't go, sell through a face-value exchange. Ticketmaster's Face Value Exchange has run since 2019 and added CashorTrade in April 2026. On Olivia Dean's tour, Ticketmaster capped its own resale at the original price and said under 20% of primary tickets were listed, per Live Nation.

Build in a buffer for the transfer itself. On October 2 and 3, Ticketmaster transfers failed across the country for shows including Harry Styles at Madison Square Garden and Metallica at the Sphere, according to TicketNews. The company said most pending transfers went through within an hour. An hour is a long time outside a venue.

And when an artist cancels a show rather than sell it to bots, as Brooks did in Kansas City, that's the system working the only way it currently can. One in seven concertgoers told a February 2026 poll for an artists' coalition that they had been scammed. Until a fine costs more than the flip pays, the cancellation may be the cheaper option.

Data as of November 2026.