- Ticketmaster apologized after an "unprecedented" number of people were sold fake Bad Bunny tickets.
- The head of Mexico's consumer protection agency said that the company now faces a hefty fine.
Ticketmaster is having a rough year — and so are music fans trying to buy tickets from the company.
The ticketing platform released a statement on Saturday apologizing after an "unprecedented" number of people were sold fake tickets to a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City.
"This caused an unusual overcrowding and the intermittent operation of our system, which generated confusion and complicated entrance to the stadium, with the unfortunate consequence that some legitimate tickets were denied entry," Ticketmaster said.
The company said that those were were sold real tickets but denied entry would be refunded.
Ricardo Sheffield, the head of Mexico's consumer protection agency, said in an interview with Radio Fórmula on Saturday that Ticketmaster will be forced to pay a fine of up to 10 percent of its earnings in 2021, according to The Washington Post. He added that Ticketmaster will also have to reimburse fans the price of the tickets, plus an extra 20% of the ticket's price.
He said the agency had received 1,600 complaints about being denied entry to the concert, per the Post.
Ticketmaster did not immediately return a request for comment from Insider.
The Mexico City concert was the last stop on Bad Bunny's World's Hottest Tour, and his last concert for the immediate future. He recently told Billboard that he would take a break in 2023 "for my physical health, my emotional health, to breathe."
The Bad Bunny fiasco comes soon after Ticketmaster's Taylor Swift debacle.
Presale tickets went on sale last month for Swift's 2023 Eras Tour, and the demand crashed the ticketing platform, with outage reports spiking soon after they became available.
The presale was open to 1.5 million "verified" fans, but 14 million people tried getting tickets. Greg Maffei, chair of Ticketmaster's parent company Live Nation, told CNBC "we could have filled 900 stadiums."
Ticketmaster then canceled its general public sale due to what it called "high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."
Live Nation has been facing a DOJ antitrust investigation since before the Taylor Swift fiasco, The New York Times reported last month.
But the Eras Tour added fuel to the fire. Politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez encouraged Swifties to make their frustrations heard to the DOJ, and fans have filed a complaint with the FTC, saying that "Ticketmaster has held reign over the industry for years."