Bot-cha! $4M slap at ticket brokers

A bunch of rogue ticket brokers must fork over more than $4 million for illegally snapping up and reselling hundreds of thousands of tickets to concerts from Bruce Springsteen to the Rolling Stones, officials said Thursday.

The six ticket-scalping companies used illegal “bots” to thwart the system and buy tickets in bulk from Ticketmaster and other sites before they were available to the public, authorities said.

One of the brokers grabbed up 1,012 tickets to a U2 concert in just a minute, according to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

The concert passes were then resold for a huge profit, Schneiderman said.

“Unscrupulous ticket resellers who break the rules and take advantage of ordinary consumers are one of the major reasons why ticketing remains a rigged system,” the AG said.

The widespread scam dated back to 2011 and targeted shows in New York state including Springsteen at the Times Union Center in Albany in 2014; the Stones at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo in 2015; and U2 at Madison Square Garden in 2015.

Broker Prestige Entertainment was guilty of the astoundingly greedy U2 ticket grab, Schneiderman said. Prestige, Presidential Tickets, Concert Specials, Fanfetch and BMC Capital Partners and Top Star Tickets will now have to pay a total of $4.19 million to the state as punishment, the AG said.

Terms of the settlement also require the companies to obtain proper licenses and prohibit them from using bots to buy them.

Prestige will pay the bulk of the settlement, $3.3 million. Concert Specials will pay $480,000, Presidential Tickets $125,000, BMC Capital $95,000, Top Star Tickets $85,000 and Fanfetch $55,000.

The AG also settled with a seventh company, Componica LLC, which devel- oped the software that the illicit brokers used to get around that technology that Web sites deploy to determine whether a buyer is human or a bot. Componica has agreed to not develop any more such software or allow its use.

“We will continue to fight to make ticketing a more fair and transparent marketplace, so fans have the opportunity to enjoy their favorite shows and events,’’ Schneiderman said.

Last year, the AG accused the concert-ticketselling industry of rigging the system so that 54 percent of tickets were reserved for only insiders and third-party sellers — and not to the public.