Fake Names, Hundreds of Credit Cards, and the First Case Brought Under the BOTS Act

Three ticket brokers based on Long Island — Just in Time Tickets, Concert Specials, and Cartisim Corp. — bought thousands of tickets to popular concerts and sporting events using automated software that could complete purchases faster than any human, then resold those tickets to fans at significant markups. According to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, the companies also used hundreds of accounts registered to family members, friends, and entirely fictitious people to get around Ticketmaster's limits on how many tickets a single buyer could purchase.DOCUMENTED

The three companies and their owners, Evan Kohanian, Steven Ebrani, and Simon Ebrani, agreed in 2021 to pay approximately $3.7 million, resolving the first cases ever brought under the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, a 2016 law aimed specifically at ticket-buying bots.DOCUMENTED

What the complaints allege

According to the complaints, the three ticket brokers committed violations of the BOTS Act to purchase thousands of tickets from Ticketmaster that they subsequently resold for millions of dollars in revenue, often at significant markups over face value.DOCUMENTED The defendants allegedly circumvented Ticketmaster's restrictions on users holding multiple accounts by creating accounts in the names of family members, friends, and entirely fictitious individuals, using hundreds of different credit cards to complete the purchases across those accounts.DOCUMENTED The complaints further allege the defendants used automated bot programs designed to defeat tests meant to screen out non-human visitors, along with software to conceal the IP addresses of the computers making the purchases — both specifically intended to prevent Ticketmaster's systems from detecting and blocking the automated buying activity.DOCUMENTED

Why this was the first case under a five-year-old law

Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act in 2016 specifically to address the use of automated software to circumvent ticket purchase limits, but the law sat without a single enforcement action for five years before this case, reflecting how new statutory authority does not automatically translate into immediate case activity — building an evidentiary record sufficient to prove bot usage and concealment techniques requires substantial technical investigation before a case can actually be filed.REVIEWED Then-Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton said at the time that the filing served notice that “these defendants are alleged to have cheated the system to the detriment of consumers.”DOCUMENTED

Why fictitious accounts were central to the scheme

Ticketmaster's per-account purchase limits exist specifically to prevent any single buyer from acquiring a disproportionate share of tickets to a popular, high-demand event, preserving broader public access at the advertised face-value price.REVIEWED Creating accounts under fictitious names, rather than simply using a single account to purchase the maximum allowed, let the defendants multiply their effective purchase limit many times over for a single event, while making it more difficult for Ticketmaster's own systems to immediately recognize that a single operation controlled all the accounts making the purchases.

Terms of the settlement

Under the settlements, the three ticket brokers faced a combined judgment of more than $31 million in civil penalties for violating the BOTS Act, an amount partially suspended based on their documented inability to pay, requiring an actual payment of $3.7 million.DOCUMENTED The settlements resolved the first enforcement actions ever brought under the statute, establishing a concrete penalty framework other ticket brokers using similar bot-and-fictitious-account tactics could expect to face in any future case.REVIEWED

The brokers used hundreds of credit cards and accounts registered to family members, friends, and people who did not exist — all to multiply how many tickets a single operation could buy.

Why the case matters

For fans trying to buy tickets to popular events at face value, this case established that the federal government will actually enforce the BOTS Act's prohibition on automated ticket-buying software and fictitious-account purchasing, five years after the law's passage — a precedent regulators have since built on in subsequent BOTS Act cases against other ticket resellers using comparable tactics.

Why the penalty structure mattered for future cases

The more than $31 million in civil penalties imposed before suspension, even though the defendants ultimately paid only $3.7 million based on inability to pay, established a penalty benchmark future BOTS Act cases could reference, giving the FTC and Department of Justice a concrete precedent for how aggressively to calculate penalties in subsequent ticket-scalping enforcement actions. That benchmark has since informed later BOTS Act cases the agency has pursued against other resellers using similar bot-and-fictitious-account tactics.

What fans can do to avoid buying from bot-driven resellers

Fans looking to avoid supporting exactly this kind of scheme can prioritize purchasing directly through a venue or artist's official verified resale program when one is available, since these programs are specifically designed to route resale transactions back through the original ticketing platform rather than through independent broker websites of uncertain origin. Checking a venue's own website for official resale partnerships before buying from an unfamiliar broker remains a reasonable first step for any fan. That habit, multiplied across enough fans, is exactly the kind of demand shift regulators hope this precedent eventually encourages. Every fan who buys through an official channel makes the underlying scalping business model marginally less profitable. Small shifts in buying habits, repeated widely enough, can meaningfully affect how profitable this kind of operation remains. That collective effect is precisely what the BOTS Act was written to encourage in the first place.

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