The Federal Trade Commission brought its first judgement against three ticket resellers for violations of the BOTS act. The BOTS act is a piece of legislation signed into law in 2016, which prohibits the use of automated bots to drive up prices for real consumers of the products. In this case, the ticket resellers used automated software to scrape tickets from websites en masse, and then turned around and resold those tickets to the public at significantly higher prices back to the general public. The FTC sought damages in the form of $31.6 million from the resellers, but suspended most of the penalties due to the financial conditions of the resellers. In the end, the resellers owe $3.7 million combined to the federal government for their actions in driving prices up for consumers. Given the rise of cyber purchases and online sales, as well as supply chain shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic worsened by bots scalping products, the BOTS act is likely to continue to see enforcement and frequent use in the future.
