A Georgia-based ticket brokerage has agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations it used overseas workers and disguised digital identities to scoop up more than 100,000 concert tickets for artists including Tate McRae, Megan Moroney, Benson Boone and Metallica, then resold them at inflated prices.
The FTC announced Monday that it had reached a settlement with Elite Events, which operates under the name smartscalpers.com, closing out an investigation into the company's ticket-buying practices. The agreement sets a total penalty of $10.7 million, though regulators agreed to let the company pay just $300,000 of that sum given its current financial condition.
The case centers on alleged violations of the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, a federal law passed in 2016 that prohibits bypassing security safeguards ticket sellers use to prevent bulk buying.
Regulators say Elite Events built its entire business around circumventing purchase limits imposed by Ticketmaster and AXS, platforms that cap how many tickets any single buyer can obtain for a given show specifically to blunt large-scale brokers.
According to the FTC's civil complaint, the company got around those caps by employing workers overseas to act as ticket "pullers," instructing them to disguise their identities using fabricated email addresses, virtual credit cards and proxy servers that masked their true IP addresses. Through this operation, the FTC alleges, Elite Events collected more than 100,000 tickets across nearly 6,000 events between 2022 and the present, then flipped them for substantial markups on resale marketplaces including StubHub, Vivid Seats and SeatGeek.
The complaint details specific examples of the company's reach across the touring industry. The FTC says Elite Events snapped up more than 1,000 tickets to various dates on Boone's 2024 Fireworks and Rollerblades Tour and close to 1,600 tickets for Moroney's 2025 Am I Okay? Tour.
Regulators also accuse the company of purchasing nearly 300 tickets for a single Metallica performance during the band's 2025 M72 World Tour, along with more than 400 tickets to one stop on McRae's Miss Possessive Tour that same year.
The complaint draws a direct line between that kind of bulk buying and the difficulties fans faced trying to see McRae live, noting that tickets for her Miss Possessive Tour had already sold out by February 2025, forcing many fans onto secondary markets where prices often ran two to three times higher than the original face value sold through Ticketmaster.
Christopher Mufarrige, who directs the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, framed the settlement as part of a broader push to protect everyday fans. He said in a statement Monday that consumers deserve the ability to buy tickets without running into bad actors who inflate prices and shut fans out of seeing the artists and athletes they want to see.
The action against Elite Events fits into a broader pattern of renewed federal attention on the BOTS Act, a law that sat largely unenforced for its first decade on the books. That changed last year after President Trump signed an executive order specifically directing the FTC to ramp up enforcement against ticket resellers under the statute.
Acting on that directive, the agency filed two other high-profile BOTS Act cases in 2025: one accusing broker Key Investment Group of relying on fraudulent Ticketmaster accounts to resell tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, and another naming Ticketmaster itself, alleging the Live Nation-owned company failed to adequately enforce its own rules against broker abuse.
Elite Events did not admit to or deny wrongdoing as part of the settlement terms.
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