A Maryland ticket broker allegedly bought and resold hundreds of thousands of event tickets for profit, including thousands of seats for Taylor Swift’s coveted Eras Tour, according to federal regulators.
The Federal Trade Commission has sued Key Investment Group, alleging the company generated millions of dollars by reselling tickets at sharply inflated prices.
The lawsuit, filed Monday, Aug. 18, in U.S. District Court in Maryland, claims Key Investment Group and related businesses circumvented Ticketmaster safeguards intended to enforce ticket-buying limits and prevent mass resales.
The company also operated under the names Epic Seats, TotalTickets.com LLC and Totally Tix LLC, the FTC said in its complaint.
Over a 12-month period, the group allegedly purchased at least 379,776 tickets through Ticketmaster, paying nearly $57 million. The tickets were later listed on secondary marketplaces for approximately $64 million, according to the agency.
Key Investment Group said it plans to “vigorously defend itself against this clear example of regulatory overreach.” The company accused the FTC of “misleadingly characterizing KIG’s use of standard internet browsers” and argued that the lawsuit could “dismantle the secondary ticket market for live events.”
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets
The complaint says Key Investment Group bought at least 10 tickets to 38 Taylor Swift concerts between March and August 2023, acquiring 2,280 tickets in total. The FTC alleges the broker earned more than $1.2 million by reselling them.
For one Taylor Swift performance alone, the defendants allegedly deployed 49 separate accounts to purchase 273 tickets. Ticketmaster limited customers to six tickets per event for the Eras Tour.
The FTC also cited a 2023 Bruce Springsteen concert in New Jersey as an example. Although the event carried a four-ticket limit, the defendants allegedly obtained and resold more than 1,500 tickets.
How the alleged scheme worked
Regulators say the group relied on thousands of Ticketmaster accounts—including fake accounts and third-party accounts it had acquired—to evade the platform’s security controls and purchase tickets beyond posted limits.
The company is further accused of using thousands of credit card numbers, including virtual cards, while masking buyers’ identities with spoofed IP addresses. It allegedly used SIM technology to capture verification codes sent to the accounts.
The FTC contends that these practices violated the FTC Act and the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. The law prohibits bypassing “a security measure, access control system, or other technological control or measure” used by a ticket seller to enforce event limits or protect the integrity of online ticket-ordering rules.
