The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice sued California ticket broker REPS & Company Inc. on October 15, 2026, alleging the firm and three executives unlawfully bypassed primary-market purchase limits under the Better Online Ticket Sales Act. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, says REPS spent more than $1.3 billion to amass over 18.5 million tickets since 2022 and generated at least $120.8 million in resale profit.
Named alongside the company are CEO Ryan Pancheri, President Brian Archibald, and Chief Operating Officer Nicholas Totagrande. The DOJ filed the case after an FTC referral. The Commission vote to refer the complaint was 2-0. The claims are allegations only; the DOJ noted there has been no determination of liability.
What the complaint says REPS did
According to the FTC, REPS purchased more than eight tickets for at least 83,500 events, many of them high-demand shows likely to sell out. Ticket issuers such as Ticketmaster and AXS use quantity caps and monitor whether purchases tie to verifiable accounts, unique credit cards, email addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses. The complaint alleges REPS used thousands of purchasing accounts built with names, addresses, or phone numbers belonging to someone other than the ticket purchaser, plus virtual cards, IP proxies, and multi-session browsers that mask identity and location.
Most of the purchasing team, the FTC says, is based in the Philippines. When issuers blocked or canceled suspected limit-busting buys, REPS allegedly worked around those controls by making slight changes to account-holder names or addresses. Internal company documents, the complaint alleges, show officials discussing tactics to keep accounts from being blocked.
One example in the FTC release: REPS allegedly generated $833,000 in profit by using 1,300 accounts to buy 7,624 tickets to a single Beyoncé Renaissance tour concert in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2023.
Why the BOTS Act case matters for fans
The BOTS Act makes it illegal to circumvent a security measure, access control system, or other technological control that a ticket issuer uses to enforce posted event ticket limits or online purchasing order rules. Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said REPS’s “entire business model is focused on trying to game the ticket-purchasing system” to obtain as many tickets as possible for inflated resale. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the DOJ Civil Division said the department will keep enforcing the BOTS Act against businesses that drive up prices by illegally exceeding purchase limits.
The filing lands in a live-entertainment market already watching federal and local fights over bots and resale caps, from the FTC’s Ticketmaster BOTS Act track to Live Nation’s BOTS Act answer on broker volume and the D.C. resale-cap lawsuit involving SeatGeek and Vivid Seats. For fans who still hit empty queues while inventory reappears at a markup, the REPS case is a test of whether the 2016 statute can reach a broker that, in the government’s telling, treated purchase limits as a puzzle to solve rather than a rule to obey.