Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan

TicketsNow, a subsidiary of Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., will pay $50,000 to settle complaints that the company sold Illinois consumers overpriced tickets to Hannah Montana and Bruce Springsteen concerts, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan announced Tuesday.

Madigan’s office says it received dozens of complaints about the high prices charged by TicketsNow, which is based in Rolling Meadows, Ill. Madigan contends that TicketsNow deceived customers into believing that they were buying from concert organizers and that they were paying face value for the tickets. Consumers weren’t aware of the mark-ups until after they had paid for the tickets.

In addition to paying the $50,000, which will be used for consumer-fraud enforcement and education, TicketsNow agreed to stop operating any Web sites that have misleading domain names. TicketsNow has already disabled more than 100 suspect Web sites, according to Madigan’s office.

Here’s more from the Illinois AG’s office:

In the course of the investigation, Madigan’s office determined that TicketsNow, which is based in Rolling Meadows, Ill., was operating hundreds of affiliated ticket resale Web sites with misleading domain names that incorporated into the Web site URLs unique names of local venues, sports teams or performers. The TicketsNow-affiliated Web sites failed to clearly state that they were ticket resellers and had obtained tickets from secondary sources, such as season ticket holders, event promoters and venue operators, in advance of the public sale. As a result, consumers did not realize that they were ordering marked-up tickets from a TicketsNow-affiliated reseller.

The agreement with Madigan’s office also requires TicketsNow resellers to clearly and conspicuously identify themselves as ticket brokers and to expressly state that they are not affiliated with the venue and may sell tickets at above-face value. In addition, TicketsNow will no longer sell tickets to non-sporting events on any of its Web sites until after Ticketmaster makes the tickets available at face value to the general public, which will help curtail speculative ticket sales prior to the actual sale date set by Ticketmaster.

For its part, Ticketmaster says the problems started before the company bought TicketsNow last year. Earlier this month, Ticketmaster announced changes that would make ticket shopping at the site more transparent. The changes include displaying the face value of all tickets sold and letting TicketsNow consumers know whether face-value tickets are still available from Ticketmaster.