Photo Credit: Claudio Schwarz
Despite its title, the BOTS Act applies to more than bot-powered efforts to bypass ticketing-platform security measures – at least according to a new order allowing an FTC lawsuit to proceed.
We covered that single-count action in detail soon after its August 2025 filing. But to recap, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused Key Investment Group (KIG) and several allegedly interconnected ticket-broker defendants of “regularly” circumventing Ticketmaster purchase-limit controls in violation of the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act).
And in doing so, the alleged ticket scalpers are said to have scooped up a substantial number of passes to popular events – 107,265 tickets between November 2022 and December 2023 alone, to be specific – before offloading them at a massive profit.
The elaborate alleged operation involved fake names and addresses, thousands of credit card numbers, and hundreds of SIM cards, per the complaint.
On the other side of the courtroom confrontation, KIG and its fellow defendants fired back against the allegations, including in a couple press releases. This includes a November 2025 dismissal motion claiming that “KIG does not use bots” or circumvent security measures.
Furthermore, KIG maintained that “Ticketmaster knows of, allows, and encourages KIG’s use of all KIG-linked accounts” and expressed the belief that Congress had penned the BOTS Act with an eye on “stopping bad actors from using bots to subvert the ticketing process.”
Of course, a legislative-intent clarification from federal lawmakers wouldn’t help KIG’s position. But amid continued Live Nation scrutiny – scrutiny that certainly hasn’t abated in the interim – Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján closed out 2025 by rebutting KIG’s dismissal motion in a brief.
Back to the initially mentioned order denying that motion, Judge George L. Russell, III granted the senators’ request to weigh in and cited their comments in his opinion.
Off the bat, the judge made clear that the BOTS Act, acronym aside, applies to more than the use of automated bots when buying tickets.
“The statute unambiguously applies to ‘any person’ and not just to ‘bots,’” Judge Russell wrote. “Additionally, the harms at issue, exorbitant ticket prices because of bad actors manipulating and re-selling tickets and circumventing posted security measures, could be caused either by ‘bots,’ or humans who write the code behind the ‘bots,’ or individuals who work in concert to recreate what bots otherwise accomplish.
“Put simply, the Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ narrow reading of the statute,” he proceeded.
What about the argument that Ticketmaster had allowed and possibly encouraged KIG’s alleged scalping operation? In more words, the court deemed security-measure enforcement (or the lack thereof) unimportant from the dismissal perspective.
“The statute’s applicability, however, does not depend on how vigorously a ticket issuer enforces its policies,” the judge determined. “Indeed, whether Ticketmaster condoned or encouraged Defendants’ behavior seems, at best, issues of fact best suited for summary judgment briefing and discovery.”
Meanwhile, the BOTS Act “does not seek to regulate large swaths of the economy nor is it particularly politically significant or controversial,” the court wrote, citing the bill’s unanimous passage (as reiterated in the senators’ amicus brief) in Congress.
“In sum, the Court agrees with the FTC that this case ‘involves neither ambiguous statutory text’ nor ‘extravagant statutory power over the national economy.’ As a result, the Court declines to dismiss on this basis,” Judge Russell concluded.
With that, the legal battle is moving forward – and factoring into a distinct BOTS Act complaint against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Right on cue, the FTC today filed a notice of supplemental authority in the case, emphasizing therein the KIG dismissal attempt’s rejection.
