Michigan lawmakers have spent the last two years reworking how the state polices the modern ticket marketplace, with a special focus on the software “bots” that devour seats in milliseconds and fuel sky-high resale prices. The headline development is a push to create a new Event Online Ticket Sales Act paired with companion measures that sharpen enforcement tools and penalties explicitly banning the use of automated programs to scoop up inventory and resell it at a markup. In late June 2025, the Michigan Senate passed SB158, a bill that would regulate online ticket sales and, critically, prohibit the use of bots to circumvent purchase limits or wait-list controls. That vote marked the most significant step yet toward a comprehensive state-level framework designed for a digital market that barely existed when earlier statutes were written.
Although the phrase “ticket scalping” conjures sidewalk hustles, the modern version is largely invisible. It happens in the split second between an on sale going live and genuine fans loading a checkout page. Automated scripts crawl ticketing sites, evading CAPTCHAs and bypassing purchase limits set by venues and platforms. The result is a lopsided market: concerts sell out instantly at face value while a parallel market of marked-up listings flourishes. Michigan lawmakers did not arrive at this issue in a vacuum. They were prodded by the same national controversies that pushed ticketing to the front page like the Eras Tour on sale fiasco and by a growing consensus among state and federal actors that enforcement tools tailored to human behavior no longer deter software-driven arbitrage. That broader policy shift includes the federal BOTS Act of 2016, a law that empowered the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to go after bot operators; statehouses have since moved to fill gaps closer to home, focusing on civil remedies, consumer disclosures, and state attorney general enforcement.
Michigan’s most visible legislative package began in the House in 2024 with a bipartisan pair of bills HB 5661 and HB 5662 sponsored by Representatives Mike McFall and Graham Filler. Those measures were designed to prohibit using or enabling automated programs to purchase event tickets at scale and to set penalties that bite. The architecture of the package did two things at once: it created a freestanding state prohibition on bot-assisted mass purchases, and it gave Michigan’s attorney general specific authority to investigate and bring civil actions to stop violations. While drafts evolved across hearings and committee work, the bills consistently contemplated fine-grained definitions of prohibited conduct and meaningful civil fines.
Momentum accelerated in 2025. In June, the House passed what outlets dubbed the “ticket bot bills,” signaling broad agreement that automated hoarding of seats was undermining consumer access. The package moved alongside other consumer-facing efforts and attracted unusually bipartisan messaging an indication that constituent frustration over ticketing had cut across political lines. News coverage emphasized the long-brewing nature of the reform, pointing back to the public outcry over high-demand tours and the sense that Michigan lagged behind peer states that had already updated their rules. Michigan Public Radio’s reporting highlighted the straightforward thrust of the House action: outlaw the bots that swallow entire sections of an arena before human fans have time to type in a CVV code.
The Senate’s parallel bill, SB158, is notable for its framing. Rather than retrofitting old text, it proposes a stand-alone “Event Online Ticket Sales Act.” That structure matters. It lets the legislature define terms like “bot,” “circumvent,” and “entertainment event” with the precision technology statutes require, instead of forcing digital conduct into analog categories. It also clarifies jurisdiction by focusing on events “held in Michigan,” anchoring enforcement to the real-world venue even when the transaction happens on a server farm hundreds of miles away. Draft language spells out that a bot includes automated software programmed to purchase tickets or to get around caps, virtual queues, or other controls, and it makes the use or facilitation of such tools unlawful. By codifying the offense at the state level, Michigan makes it possible for local prosecutors and the attorney general to move quickly with civil enforcement and injunctive relief, even as federal agencies pursue broader competition or consumer-protection theories.
Enforcement is the unglamorous heart of any consumer statute. Michigan’s package tries to balance deterrence with practicality. News and bill-tracking summaries describe civil fines that can reach as high as $5,000 per ticket transaction, an amount calibrated to the economics of resale at scale. A cap like that matters far more to a script buying thousands of seats than to a single ticket listed above face value by a casual seller. The bills also envision court orders that can freeze or unwind transactions and stop ongoing violations, giving the attorney general leverage beyond penalties after the fact. On paper, that kind of injunctive authority is essential for a marketplace where a single on sale can be over in minutes and the harm outsized prices and shut-out fans appears immediately.
Context matters, and in Michigan the ticketing debate is unfolding alongside larger competition enforcement in live entertainment. In May 2024, the Michigan Attorney General joined the U.S. Department of Justice and numerous states in an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. The complaint alleges monopolization that harms venues, artists, and consumers by suppressing competition and reducing transparency. Whether or not that litigation succeeds, its presence signals that Michigan intends to address both the market structure and the market behavior that frustrate fans. The anti-bot bills focus on a tactic automated bulk buying that distorts supply at the moment of sale. The antitrust case, by contrast, challenges the architecture within which that sale occurs. The two strategies aren’t redundant; they are complementary.
If the Senate bill’s title plants a stake in online ticketing, its subtext is consumer protection updated for the current era. Traditional consumer laws are built to police misstatements, hidden fees, and unfair contract terms. Digital ticketing adds a layer of gatekeeping technology queues, pre-sale codes, dynamic pricing algorithms, transfer restrictions that can be subverted or exploited by parties with technical sophistication. A statute that declares it unlawful to deploy, sell, or knowingly benefit from tools that bypass those gatekeepers targets the core of the harm: the quiet, early-stage capture of inventory. It also provides a ready hook for collaboration with platforms, which already log abnormal traffic patterns and can supply evidence needed to prove a violation.
The state’s choice to peg enforcement authority to the attorney general tracks a broader trend cataloged by national policy groups: legislatures are increasingly leaning on their consumer-protection chiefs to police pricing, refunds, disclosures, and resale practices in ticketing. The National Conference of State Legislatures has documented a flurry of state bills more than twenty jurisdictions introducing measures in 2024 alone spanning bots, fee transparency, refunds for canceled or rescheduled events, and tax compliance. Michigan’s package slots cleanly into that wave, with the crucial addition of civil penalties sized to disrupt industrial-scale botting.
One question that often arises in these debates is whether anti-bot laws hurt legitimate resellers or fans who cannot attend an event and want to sell their seats. Michigan’s proposals are careful on that score. The target is not secondary markets per se, nor individual resales at a premium or discount. The focus is on bypassing safeguards designed to keep on sales fair purchase caps, queue systems, and identity verification. By banning the technology that defeats those safeguards, the law leaves room for lawful resale but aims to remove the artificial scarcity that drives extreme markups. The policy bet is straightforward: if initial distribution is fairer, the need and opportunity for predatory arbitrage shrink.
Another tension is ticket transferability. Critics sometimes argue that restrictions on transferring tickets or policies that “lock” a ticket to a user’s app are themselves anti-consumer. Supporters respond that transfer restrictions can curb bot activity and fraud. Michigan’s bills do not purport to settle that fight globally, and nothing in the current package resembles a comprehensive ticket rights bill dictating transfer rules across the board. Instead, the legislature is carving out a narrow lane where consensus exists it is unlawful to weaponize code to destroy the level playing field at the point of sale.
Penalties and definitions, however, are only the skeleton. Consumer protection also depends on day-to-day guidance and deterrence outside the courtroom. The Michigan Attorney General’s office has repeatedly warned fans about ticket scams, particularly around high-demand moments like the Lions’ playoff run. Those advisories urge basic hygiene use trusted platforms, beware of unusual payment methods, confirm barcode authenticity that dovetails with the legislative project. If fans are more cautious and laws make botting riskier, scammers’ margins shrink. That combination of top-down enforcement and bottom-up vigilance is how fraud markets are made less hospitable.
The politics of ticketing also reflect cultural salience. “Taylor Swift” turns up in headlines not simply as shorthand for demand but as a symbol of how quickly enforcement and platform design can fail under stress. Michigan press coverage and committee rhetoric sometimes leaned into that symbolism, even as the bills’ authors cast the work in more universal consumer terms. When a problem becomes a punch line in late-night monologues and family group chats, lawmakers tend to move faster. That urgency is why multiple states advanced anti-bot bills in parallel and why Michigan’s package crossed from idea to chamber votes in relatively short order.
It is worth noting what the proposed laws do not do. They do not redesign the economics of primary ticketing, where dynamic pricing can send face values soaring before resellers ever touch a listing. They do not dictate service-fee disclosures beyond general consumer-law expectations, though those issues are under active consideration in many states. And they do not break up vertical integration between promoters, venues, and primary platforms that is the remit of antitrust litigation. Instead, the bills focus on an identifiable, provable, and widely reviled practice that directly harms fans at the moment of purchase. That narrow scope likely aided bipartisan support, even among legislators who disagree about broader market regulation.
How will this work in practice if enacted? Imagine a marquee arena show in Detroit. A legitimate on sale might allocate thousands of seats with a limit of four per customer, enforced through a virtual queue and account verification. A bot farm leveraging headless browsers, residential proxies, and CAPTCHA-solving services could still punch through those defenses, capturing hundreds of tickets in minutes. Under Michigan’s proposed act, the use of that software to circumvent purchase limits would itself be a civil offense. The attorney general could move in court for an injunction to block the operators’ accounts, compel platforms to void or reclaim the fraudulently purchased tickets, and seek fines calculated per transaction. Even if the underlying platforms are headquartered elsewhere, the event’s location in Michigan anchors jurisdiction. This is not a silver bullet bot developers iterate fast but it adds legal risk and procedural tools that did not exist under older statutes.
For venues and artists, the upside is more predictable on sale. Bots distort not just prices but also demand signals; when a script instantly drains a section, it is hard to tell how many real fans were willing to pay face value. That uncertainty causes promoters to lean more heavily on dynamic pricing and holds, which can, in turn, alienate fans. If bot traffic drops, primary sales become a cleaner readout of demand, helping artists set prices that are high enough to limit arbitrage but not so high that fans feel gouged. A more accurate demand curve is also good for public safety. Fewer counterfeit or invalid tickets circulating on game day means fewer turn-aways at the gate and less strain on security, especially at large venues.
For platforms, compliance will be partly technical and partly contractual. Ticketing companies already deploy fraud-detection stacks that flag impossible click speeds and suspicious IP patterns. A state statute that names bot circumvention as a specific offense encourages platforms to formalize those controls in terms of service and to share logs with law enforcement when abuse crosses into illegality. It also nudges platforms to invest in genuine user experience clear fee disclosures, accessible refunds, and transparent seat maps because the more fans trust the primary market, the less oxygen remains for gray-market sellers.
Consumers benefit from the combination of better enforcement and better design, but they will still need to practice ordinary caution. No law can force every seller on a classifieds platform to verify a barcode before a hand-off in a parking lot. What laws can do is change the baseline: fewer bots at on sale, fewer fake listings created from ill-gotten inventory, and a higher likelihood that the seat you buy was offered to you under the same rules as everyone else. When fans believe the game is not rigged, they are more likely to participate in presales, join venue loyalty clubs, and travel for events behavior that has real economic consequences for Michigan’s hospitality sector.
Michigan’s approach will continue to evolve, and observers should expect cleanup amendments as courts and agencies implement the new regime. Defining a “bot” broadly enough to catch evasive tactics without sweeping in benign automation is a drafting challenge. So is calibrating penalties so that they land hardest on industrial actors rather than casual sellers. If the state follows the path of other jurisdictions, we may see tweaks that clarify what counts as circumvention, what evidence is needed to prove it, and how courts should handle tickets already resold to good-faith purchasers. A living statute is not a flaw; it is the reality of regulating a market where both criminals and legitimate entrepreneurs innovate constantly.
The policy backdrop will also be shaped by developments in Washington. If the federal antitrust case against Live Nation yields structural remedies, the balance of power in ticketing could shift in ways that affect everything from service fees to venue contracts. If the FTC brings more cases under the BOTS Act, or if Congress strengthens disclosure rules, state-level efforts like Michigan’s will plug into a denser enforcement web. But none of those federal outcomes are guaranteed, and none will substitute for a clear state remedy when Michigan consumers are harmed at Michigan events. That is the virtue of the emerging Event Online Ticket Sales Act: it is targeted, enforceable, and rooted in the specific harms Michigan residents encounter when they try to buy a seat at a game or a show.
Political attention to ticketing tends to surge around cultural flashpoints championship runs, blockbuster tours, and farewell shows. It is tempting to dismiss the issue as ephemeral. Yet for many families, tickets are not luxuries but the backbone of shared experiences: a child’s first concert, a season opener downtown, a once-in-a-lifetime reunion tour. When bots transform those moments into financial puzzles or outright scams, it erodes trust not just in vendors but in public institutions that are supposed to protect consumers. Updating the law to reflect how tickets are actually bought and sold online is therefore more than an administrative fix. It is a statement that Michigan intends to keep cultural access within reach of ordinary residents.
The final shape of Michigan’s reforms will depend on reconciliation between House and Senate language and on how agencies implement the new authority. But the trajectory is clear. The Legislature has moved from general consumer-law principles to a purpose-built ban on the tactics that dominate modern ticket scalping. The attorney general will gain tools to move fast when bots strike. Platforms will have clearer obligations and incentives to cooperate. And fans should see a market that is at least less rigged, even if not yet entirely fair. In a domain where milliseconds matter, clarity and speed count. Michigan is building both into law.
Contact Tishkoff
Tishkoff PLC specializes in business law and litigation. For inquiries, contact us at www.tish.law/contact/. & check out Tishkoff PLC’s Website (www.Tish.Law/), eBooks (www.Tish.Law/e-books), Blogs (www.Tish.Law/blog) and References (www.Tish.Law/resources).