Live Nation Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Ticketmaster Hack, With Potentially Millions of Customers Joining

Photo Credit: Ashley King

After hackers ran amok in Ticketmaster’s servers, stealing data and reverse engineering its Safe Tix feature—Live Nation is now facing a class action lawsuit over its response to the incident.The lawsuit alleges Live Nation failed to adequately protect the data of its users and only alerted users of the hack months after it occurred. The lawsuit says Live Nation was negligent in its duties to protect customers’ data and seeks unspecified damages of at least $5 million on behalf of millions of users who were impacted by the hack.

“Ticketmaster operates a digital ticketing platform that requires customers to provide their personality identifiable information (PII) prior to purchase. [Ticketmaster] revealed in a June 28, 2024 notice to the Maine Attorney General that a hacker gained unauthorized access to Defendant’s cloud database, owned an operated by Snowflake, Inc. on April 2, 2024.”

“[Ticketmaster] did not discover the data breach until May 23, 2024, nearly seven weeks later. It did not notify plaintiff or class members until July 17, 2024—almost two months after the data breach was discovered. Plaintiff’s and class members PII was compromised in a data breach including personal details like name, contact information, and payment card information of about 560 million Ticketmaster customers.”

“The hackers are demanding a ransom payment of $500,000 to prevent the data from being resold on the dark web; a clear indication that the data breach was for the purpose of using the Plaintiff’s and Class Members’ personal information to perpetuate identity theft and other fraud.”

The lawsuit faults Ticketmaster for retaining PII that should have been deleted after a purchase. It also claims that Ticketmaster’s business involves selling data on users including when they purchase merchandise, a ticket to an event, emails, IP addresses, information about transactions to business partners and data brokers.“As a result of the data breach, plaintiff and class members have been exposed to a substantial risk of fraud and identity theft. Plaintiff and class members must now and in the future closely monitor their financial accounts to guard against identity theft,” the lawsuit reads. “Plaintiff and class members may also incur out of pocket costs, for purchasing credit monitoring services, credit freezes, credit reports, or other protective measures to deter and detect identity theft.”

Ticketmaster has not responded to the lawsuit, which was filed in California federal court.