More Taylor Swift fans have “bad blood” with Ticketmaster and are suing the ticketing company following the controversy involving the singer’s “The Eras” tour.
The lawsuit comes after a different group of fans filed a suit toward the ticket company earlier this month and accused it — along with its parent company Live Nation Entertainment — of fraud, price-fixing and antitrust violations, Pitchfork reported.
The lawsuits have arrived following a chaotic presale of Swift tour tickets that the company chalked up to “extraordinarily high demands on ticket systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory,” a fiasco that led to Ticketmaster pulling the plug on a general ticket sale after the presale.
The federal class action lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims that Ticketmaster “intentionally and purposefully misled millions of fans into believing it would prevent bots and scalpers from participating in the presale,” Rolling Stone reported.
HuffPost has reached out to Ticketmaster for comment.
The lawsuit added that the fans weren’t able to purchase tickets through the presale event due to heavy traffic — 14 million “unverified” users — along with the bots’ participation in the events, the magazine reported.
The two dozen-plus plaintiffs also claimed Ticketmaster and Live Nation participated in fraud and price-fixing in addition to “intentional misrepresentation” and false advertising, Pitchfork reported.
The lawsuit alleged Ticketmaster represented that tickets were sold at face value “when they were not” and, rather, they allowed people who purchased tickets to resell them during the presale.
The ticket controversy is set to spark an upcoming Senate hearing on the lack of competition in the industry while The New York Times reported in November that the Justice Department has launched an investigation into Live Nation Entertainment.
Swift’s tour, her first in five years, is set to earn an estimated $591 million in ticket sales and has made the “Anti-Hero” singer the highest-grossing female touring artist in history, according to Billboard.
Ticketmaster has entertained Swift’s request and granted some fans of the singer, who previously apologized to fans over the “excruciating” scenario, an “additional opportunity” to purchase up to two tickets for the tour through a presale event earlier this month.