Feds Say a Broker Bought 7,624 Tickets to One Beyoncé Show

The Justice Department says San Diego's REPS & Co. used 1,300 Ticketmaster accounts and cleared about $833,000 on that one night.

Fans hoping to catch Beyoncé's Renaissance Tour at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City could buy four to eight tickets apiece, federal prosecutors say. The Justice Department says one San Diego ticket broker came away with 7,624, The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone reported Thursday.

That broker, REPS & Company Inc., spread those Oct. 1, 2023, purchases across at least 1,300 Ticketmaster accounts and made about $833,323 reselling them, according to a 22-page lawsuit filed Thursday that Rolling Stone obtained. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission named the company and three executives, Ryan Pancheri, Brian Archibald and Nicholas Totagrande, in the case filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, the department said.

They're accused of violating the FTC Act and the Better Online Ticket Sales Act, the BOTS Act, which bans using technology to dodge ticket limits. The way the government tells it, REPS built a whole business around beating that one limit.

Since 2022, the department says, REPS has paid more than $1.3 billion for its haul. That bought upward of 18.5 million tickets to at least 83,000 events, from concerts and Broadway shows to college games, picked out by software as high-demand, Rolling Stone reported.

The tickets went back out at a markup on StubHub, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, Gametime and Ticketmaster's own resale platform. Prosecutors claim REPS cleared at least $120.8 million in profit.

The complaint sums up the model bluntly: it's "predicated on identifying events for which tickets will be in high demand and buy up tickets for those events before ordinary consumers can," as The Hollywood Reporter quoted it. To pull that off, the government says, REPS opened thousands of accounts on Ticketmaster and AXS, hired buyers in the Philippines and hid their IP addresses behind VPNs and other tools.

Beyoncé isn't the only name in it. For Pitbull's Sept. 7, 2024, concert at the Empower FCU Amphitheater outside Syracuse, N.Y., REPS allegedly bought 5,430 tickets through at least 700 accounts, Rolling Stone reported. Prosecutors say that was nearly a third of the venue's capacity, good for about $120,109 in profit.

The suit also points to concerts by Post Malone and Luke Bryan, and prosecutors say the bulk resales often went against what the artists wanted, according to Rolling Stone.

The Justice Department's announcement says the claims are allegations only and no court has found anyone liable. Rolling Stone couldn't immediately reach a REPS spokesperson Thursday. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate said the department will keep enforcing the BOTS Act alongside the FTC.

The people at the other end of all those accounts are the ones the government says paid for it. REPS's buying, the complaint alleges in a passage The Hollywood Reporter quoted, hurt consumers "who otherwise may have been able to purchase those tickets in the first instance from ticket issuers at lower prices."

Source: hollywoodreporter.com, retrieved October 16, 2026. Other sources: rollingstone.com, justice.gov.