As the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit proceeds, Ticketmaster has alerted regulators in Congress to major changes in the company’s resale policies.

In a 10-page letter signed by Live Nation Executive Vice President Daniel M. Wall and addressed to Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján, the company announced plans to prevent duplicate accounts on its resale platform by requiring sellers to register with their Social Security numbers. Ticketmaster will also shut down its controversial TradeDesk tool, which allowed ticket brokers to manage resale listings at scale.

Ticketmaster’s letter directly addresses the suit filed by the FTC and seven U.S. states in September, which alleges that the ticketing giant and its Live Nation parent company collaborated with resellers to inflate ticket prices. While claiming that the policy changes are intended to increase the share of tickets going to fans, Ticketmaster’s letter also denounces the FTC’s charges of Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act violations, aftermarket manipulation and anti-competitive business practices, which the company says “presents a distorted view of the facts and the law,” per Billboard.

The FTC’s suit alleges that despite continued claims to limit the quantity of ticket purchases, Live Nation allowed brokers to exceed stated maximums by creating multiple accounts with false email addresses, alternate SIM cards and IP-masking web browsers. After allowing these practices, the company facilitated the movement of illicitly procured tickets to the secondary market through the TradeDesk platform, which let resellers track high-volume sales and combine up to thousands of Ticketmaster accounts.

Wall’s letter asserts that “Ticketmaster does more than anyone to fight bots and get tickets into the hands of real fans.” The company’s top regulatory affairs lawyer claimed that before implementing new verification measures, Ticketmaster already blocks more than 99% of 25 million daily signup attempts. While noting that TradeDesk’s shutdown was intended only to counter “reputational harm,” the letter points to comparable inventory management systems like StubHub’s TicketUtils and Vivid Seats’ SkyBox. 

The FTC holds that Live Nation has enabled an exploitative aftermarket in oversights and consumer deception throughout its business model, profiting at every step of the resale process. “When reselling tickets brokers purchased from Ticketmaster,” the FTC’s complaint alleges, “Defendants can ‘triple dip’ on fees, collecting fees from: (1) brokers when they purchase the tickets on the primary market, (2) brokers, again, when Ticketmaster sells their tickets on Ticketmaster’s secondary market, and, finally, (3) consumers who purchase tickets from Ticketmaster on its secondary market.”

The National Independent Venue Association criticized claims made in Ticketmaster’s letter with a statement of their own:

“Live Nation’s ‘actions’ on resale detailed in a letter to Congress are too little and too late to get back the trust of fans, artists, and stages. They apparently got caught opening up their systems to predatory resellers, which is a betrayal of fans and artists. This looks like an attempt to clean up their devastated public image following the Federal Trade Commission’s strong BOTS Act and deceptive practices case against them. Based on that suit and this letter, we have seen clear evidence that Live Nation and Ticketmaster are in bed with scalpers, and resale platforms like StubHub and Vivid Seats benefit daily from it.

The meaningful way to repair the damage done by Live Nation’s alleged collusion with scalpers is for them to voluntarily cap resale tickets on their resale platform at no more than the face value of the original ticket.

We look forward to the U.S. Department of Justice and 40 state attorneys general breaking up Live Nation soon and ending their anti-competitive practices for good.”

Read the full details of Ticketmaster’s letter here. Learn more about the FTC’s suit and a new wave of efforts to “rigorously enforce” the BOTS Act here.