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FTC Sues Ticket Reseller Over Scalped Taylor Swift Eras Tour Tickets

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The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against a Maryland-based ticket resale company on Monday, alleging that the company broke federal law to obtain hundreds of thousands of tickets to Taylor Swift‘s Eras tour and other major concerts and scalp them for millions of dollars in profit.

In the lawsuit, filed in federal court on Monday and reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter, the FTC alleged that Key Investment Group violated the Better Online Ticket Sales Act — better known as the BOTS Act — to work around Ticketmaster’s ticket purchase limits and obtain nearly 380,000 concert tickets between November of 2022 and December of 2023. The company spent about $57 million for the tickets and resold them for about $64 million.

The FTC alleged that to secure so many tickets, the company used “thousands of fictitious Ticketmaster accounts, thousands of virtual and traditional credit card numbers, proxy or spoofed IP addresses, and SIM banks to bypass or otherwise avoid security measures” on Ticketmaster.

Per the lawsuit, between March and August of 2023, Key Investment Group had bought about 2,280 tickets for Swift’s 38 Eras Tour show dates, exceeding the shows’ six-ticket-per-customer limit, buying them for about $744,970.29 and reselling them for $1,961,980.65. At just one of Swift’s Allegiant Stadium shows in Las Vegas, the company used 49 different accounts to secure 273 tickets, reselling them for $119,227.21 in net profit.

Meanwhile for a 2023 Bruce Springsteen show at MetLife Stadium, Key Investment group used 277 different accounts to secure over 1,500 tickets, marking them up for a combined $21,000 in revenue.

The FTC’s lawsuit comes months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order back in March calling for increased of the BOTS Act. Until now, the BOTS Act had only been enforced one time since it was passed into law back into 2016.

“President Trump made it clear in his March Executive Order that unscrupulous middlemen who harm fans and jack up prices through anticompetitive methods will hear from us,” FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in a statement. “Today’s action puts brokers on notice that the Trump-Vance FTC will police operations that unlawfully circumvent ticket sellers’ purchase limits, ensuring that consumers have an opportunity to buy tickets at fair prices.”

In an unprecedented move, the FTC has twisted the intent of the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, a law designed to target malicious software, into a weapon against legitimate businesses and consumers,” a representative for KIG said in a statement. “Under the FTC’s interpretation, anyone who purchases more than four tickets or uses more than one account could be deemed in violation of federal law. That outcome is not only illogical, it’s absurd. Even more troubling, the FTC misleadingly characterizes Key Investment Group’s use of standard internet browsers to purchase tickets as equivalent to deploying unlawful software. This portrayal is both deceptive and malicious. Key Investment Group is prepared to vigorously defend itself against this clear example of regulatory overreach.

The company had filed a lawsuit of its own against the FTC back in July over this case’s investigation, arguing that KIG has fully complied with the BOTS Act.

“The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act is intended to address bad actors using ticket bots, or specialized computer scripts, to find ways to circumvent the ticket buying security systems and secure large volumes of event tickets before consumers have a chance to buy. This is not what KIG does,” the company said in a release at the time.

The FTC suit is just the latest in a busy year for government intervention in the live music business. Last month, the DOJ indicted Oak View Group CEO Tim Leiweke on bid-rigging allegations over the development of the Moody Center in Austin Texas. (Leiweke stepped down from the company but denied the DOJ’s allegations.) Back in May, as part of Trump’s executive order, the DOJ and FTC launched a public inquiry into the live music business.

The FTC’s suit has been applauded by other stakeholders in the live music business who’ve advocated for more enforcement in the ticketing industry. The National Independent Venue Association’s executive director Stephen Parker called the suit, “a momentous step toward finally holding ticket brokers and resale platforms accountable for violating the BOTS Act.”

“Fans and independent stages have been waiting years for real enforcement, and we hope this marks the beginning of a new era of rigorous oversight,” Parker said in a statement. “We applaud today’s actions and urge the FTC to keep going and ramp up its work to protect fans, artists, and stages from illegal bots and other methods intended to circumvent the law.”



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Texas vs. Ohio State live updates: Arch Manning headlines as Longhorns, Buckeyes clash in top-three showdown

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The biggest season opener in college football history has arrived. No. 1 Texas. Vs. No. 3 Ohio State. Arch Madness against the reigning national champions.

Rarely do we see the preseason No. 1 team open the year as an underdog, and yet here is Texas, sprinting into Week 1 against the Buckeyes, the slight favorites who aim to defend their national title by taking down the hyped-up Longhorns, who carry the No. 1 ranking next to their name in the preseason for the first time in their long history as a blue blood.

The two biggest names in the sport — Texas quarterback Arch Manning and Ohio State receiver Jeremiah Smith — lead their teams into Ohio Stadium with SEC and Big Ten pride on the line. Manning is not your ordinary quarterback, though this will be his first career start on the road. He has a lineage of superiority to defend. Smith, who electrified the country as a freshman last year, already has a national championship ring.

Who wins? We won’t have to ask that question much longer. Kickoff is set for 12 p.m. ET.

Keep it locked here as CBS Sports provides you with live updates, highlights and analysis as Texas battles Ohio State to open the 2025 season in Week 1. 





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Firefighter arrested by US border agents was on track for legal status, lawyers say | Oregon

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Lawyers are demanding the release of a longtime Oregon resident arrested by US border patrol while fighting a Washington state wildfire, saying Friday that the firefighter was already on track for legal status after helping federal investigators solve a crime against his family.

His arrest was illegal, the lawyers said, and violated Department of Homeland Security polices that say immigration enforcement must not be conducted at locations where emergency responses are happening.

He is one of two firefighters arrested this week while working the Bear Gulch fire in the Olympic national forest, which as of Friday had burned about 14 sq miles (36 sq km) and was only 13% contained, forcing evacuations.

US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement on Thursday that it had been helping the Bureau of Land Management with a criminal investigation into two contractors working at the fire when it discovered two firefighters who they said were in the country without permanent legal status.

The firefighter, whose name has not been made public, has lived in the US for 19 years after arriving with his family at the age of four. He received a U-visa certification from the US attorney’s office in Oregon in 2017 and submitted his U-visa application with US Citizenship and Immigration Services the following year.

The U-visa program was established by Congress to protect victims of serious crimes who assist federal investigators, and the man has been waiting since 2018 for the immigration agency to decide on his application, according to Stephen Manning, a lawyer with Innovation Law Lab, a Portland-based non-profit representing the firefighter.

Another homeland security policy says agents cannot detain people who are receiving or have applied for victim-based immigration benefits, his lawyer said. Charging the man with an immigration violation was “an illegal after-the-fact justification” given his U-visa status.

His lawyers said Friday that they located him in the immigration detention system and were able to make contact. They were still processing information and are demanding his immediate release, they told the AP in an email.

A senior DHS official said in a statement to the AP on Friday that the two men apprehended were not firefighters and were not actively fighting the fire. Officials said they were providing a supporting role by cutting logs into firewood.

“The firefighting response remained uninterrupted the entire time,” the statement said. “No active firefighters were even questioned, and US Border Patrol’s actions did not prevent or interfere with any personnel actively engaged in firefighting efforts.”

When the Bureau of Land Management was asked to provide information about why its contracts with two companies were terminated and 42 firefighters were escorted away from the state’s largest wildfire, it declined. It would only say it cooperates with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

“These law enforcement professionals contribute to broader federal enforcement efforts by maintaining public safety, protecting natural resources, and collaborating with the agencies, such as the Border Patrol,” interior department spokesperson Alyse Sharpe told the Associated Press in an email.

Manning said in a letter to Oregon senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, that the arrest violated homeland security policy.

Wyden was critical of the border patrol’s operation, saying the Trump administration was more concerned about conducting raids on fire crews than protecting communities from catastrophic fires. Firefighters put their lives on the line, Wyden emphasized, including the Oregon firefighter who died on Sunday while battling a wildfire in south-western Montana.

“The last thing that wildland firefighter crews need is to be worried about masked individuals trampling their due process rights,” Wyden said in an email to the AP.

Meanwhile, wildfire officials were still trying to get control of the Bear Gulch fire. The number of personnel working on the blaze was listed at 303 on Friday, down from 349 on Thursday.



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Why Wall Street has developed an unhealthy obsession with Nvidia

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A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.


New York
 — 

For markets, the most important story of the week was, somehow, not the president’s attempted firing of a top Federal Reserve official. Instead, it was Nvidia’s earnings report, a quarterly event that, in the financial world, has taken on Super Bowl-level enthusiasm. (Seriously, the company has fans who throw watch parties for the occasion, complete with Mardi Gras beads.)

It’s not hard to see why folks are all fired up. If you’d invested $1,000 in Nvidia (NVDA) shares just two years ago, you’d be sitting on a $3,000 profit right now. The stock is up 30% this year, versus the S&P 500’s 10% gain. And quarter after quarter, Nvidia tends to blow past the consensus forecast on Wall Street. What’s not to love?

Well, for some investors, at least, the market around Nvidia is starting to look awfully bubbly. And not just because Sam Altman, the CEO of one of Nvidia’s customers, has publicly speculated that AI was a bubble.

Here are some of the reasons people are beginning to worry about the Nvidia story.

Reason No. 1: Nvidia is huge. But not just, like, “Oh, it’s a big company!” It is bigger, in terms of market value, than any public company ever. We often toss around its market capitalization — $4 trillion — as if that number makes any sense.

Consider that the world had never seen a $1 trillion public company until Apple crossed the threshold in 2018. Now we have nearly a dozen, almost all of them in the American tech sector.

Reason No. 1(a): That size makes Nvidia (pronounced in-vid-ee-uh) on its own account for 8% of the S&P 500. So, even if you don’t hold Nvidia shares, you gotta watch its results because they could swing the entire market. Zoom out even further: Nvidia’s market cap accounts for 3.6% of global GDP, according to Deutsche Bank. Yes. One single company, which gets half its revenue from just three customers, is that huge.

Reason No. 2: When we talk about the AI industry, we’re mostly talking about Nvidia. If you use ChatGPT, that’s powered by Nvidia chips. The same goes for Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Amazon’s…whatever Amazon’s chatbot is called — all of those products are powered by the processors made by this company that up until a few years ago was just a tech workhorse churning out processors that make video games look cooler.

(You may be thinking, Hey, Nvidia sounds kinda like a monopoly, to which I say, Please do not use the m-word around here, or else I’ll have to call the lawyers. Let’s just say Nvidia almost exclusively controls the supply of vital resources to an entire industry and enjoys monopoly-esque profit margins.)

So, if you follow the Gospel of AI and believe that the technology has the power to dismantle the entire global economy, Nvidia is your clear picks-and-shovels play.

But — and here’s why the focus on Nvidia is getting even more intense — what if the technology Nvidia is powering turns out to be, I dunno, not quite the revolution that your Sams Altman or Darios Amodei have promised? What happens to the picks and shovels when the gold rush goes bust?

Last week, I wrote that the AI vibe shift was underway, nearly three years after ChatGPT’s public debut set off a frenzy of investment and a nauseating amount of corporate pablum about how AI is going to change everything. A rash of bad AI headlines, combined with signs of a weakening economy, has rattled investors, sparking a tech sell-off last week and a lot of nail-biting ahead of Nvidia’s earnings.

To be fair, AI chatbots like ChatGPT have changed a lot — like how much we talk about AI, and it has seriously increased the use of the word “trillion” in the financial media. Chatbots have also been accused of pushing multiple people to suicide and fueling delusional spirals that ruin lives.

What AI hasn’t done is demonstrate a single use case that would even come close to justifying the hundreds of billions of dollars companies are pouring into it.

The frenzy isn’t limited to speculative delusions on Wall Street. There is actually so much real money behind the AI race that capital expenditures from American tech giants have contributed more to GDP growth this year than consumer spending has, according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research.

I’m going to repeat that, because it’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever read: AI-related capex has contributed more to US economic growth this year than consumer spending.

Consumer spending! That’s the engine of the economy — some 70% of our GDP. That’s just an insane concentration of capital to build infrastructure for what could end up being just another vial of Silicon Valley snake oil.

“Ultimately, investment only makes sense insofar as it raises productivity and real wages and consumer spending,” Dutta said in a podcast. “That’s not yet happening.”





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