Vladimir Artamonov, 46, was taken into custody in Elkridge, Maryland, where he lived, and was charged with securities, wire and investment adviser fraud for allegedly carrying out the scheme from September 2021 through February 2024.

An indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court said Artamonov promised big returns and little risk to dupe former classmates and other alumni into investing with him, telling one investor: “It will be your best investment. The insight is air tight.”

Messages for comment left with Harvard and a lawyer for Artamonov were not immediately returned. Artamonov, appearing before a magistrate judge in federal court in Maryland, was released on $300,000 bail with instructions to have no contact with victims or potential trial witnesses.

The allegations against Artamonov were first revealed in late February 2024 by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who said in a news release then that her office learned about the fraud after one of several dozen investors ended his own life after learning he had lost $100,000.

“Even sophisticated investors can be conned by fraudsters, especially when personal relationships and networks are used to build a false sense of trust,” James said.

She said Artamonov “used his alumnus status from Harvard Business School to prey on his classmates and others while seeming legitimate and dependable.”

Artamonov, a 2003 Harvard graduate with a master’s in business administration, used the school’s alumni network to identify investors, authorities said.

The indictment said he promised investors that he could identify securities on the verge of making large gains by spotting public insurance company filings by affiliates of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. prior to public filings made to the Securities and Exchange Commission that are more closely followed by investors.

Instead of following that plan, Artamonov put investor money into risky short-term options, losing millions of dollars, often within days of receiving the money from investors, the indictment said.

It said he repeatedly assured investors that big profits were on the horizon and even promised one investor that it was “almost certain we will make a ton of money” soon and that they would “brag” about their “crazy gains” at the Harvard Business School reunion.

Investors eventually demanded their money back, causing Artamonov to return less than $400,000 by paying original investors with money from new investors or by declining to reimburse them at all, the indictment said.

It said Artamonov lost most of the money or spent tens of thousands of dollars on items such as lodging, food and alcohol, and transportation.

Christopher G. Raia, head of New York’s FBI office, said in a news release that Artamonov “exploited the prestige of a well-respected university and investment company to unlawfully rocure investments, which he used to pay for personal expenses.”

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said Artamonov “betrayed investors, including friends and former Ivy League classmates.”

The US’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued Live Nation and its ticketing arm, Ticketmaster, accusing the company of profiting from scalpers operating on its platform.

In a complaint filed on Thursday (September 18) in the US District Court for the Central District of California, the FTC accused Ticketmaster of failing to uphold its own ticket purchase limits, in effect allowing scalpers to buy up large numbers of tickets and to resell them on the secondary market at markups.

The FTC says Ticketmaster is motivated to do this because it makes additional fees on the tickets’ resale.

Ticketmaster “can ‘triple dip’ on fees, collecting fees from: (1) brokers when they purchase the tickets on the primary market, (2) brokers, again, when Ticketmaster sells their tickets on Ticketmaster’s secondary market, and, finally, (3) consumers who purchase tickets from Ticketmaster on its secondary market,” stated the complaint.

Joining the FTC in the lawsuit are the district attorneys of seven states: Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

The complaint, which you can read in full here, alleges that Ticketmaster violated the BOTS Act, the 2016 law forbidding the use of bots to buy tickets in online stores. Live Nation has in the past supported the BOTS Act.

The FTC notes that Live Nation’s policy is to allow artists to set ticket purchase limits themselves, but “in private… defendants have tacitly worked with those very same scalpers, allowing them to unlawfully purchase millions of dollars in tickets in the primary market, so that defendants can extract more profit for themselves when reselling those tickets on the secondary market.”

The FTC alleges that Ticketmaster has been aware for years that certain ticket buyers have violated the limit and “turned a blind eye” to the practice.

The complaint states that in 2018, Ticketmaster identified five ticket brokers who controlled 6,345 Ticketmaster accounts and possessed more than 246,000 tickets to nearly 2,600 events.

“Defendants have tacitly worked with those very same scalpers, allowing them to unlawfully purchase millions of dollars in tickets in the primary market, so that defendants can extract more profit for themselves when reselling those tickets on the secondary market.”

FTC complaint against Live Nation/Ticketmaster

“In public, defendants maintain that their business model is at odds with brokers that routinely exceed ticket limits. In private, defendants acknowledge that their business model and bottom line benefit from brokers preventing ordinary Americans from purchasing tickets to the shows they want to see at the prices artists set,” the complaint states.

The FTC also alleges that Ticketmaster is engaged in “bait-and-switch” tactics in which the company displays “deceptively low ticket prices to consumers” and ends up charging “much more” at checkout.

Live Nation announced in 2023 that it was switching to an “all-in” pricing model at its owned venues in the US, under which the final price, including fees but excluding sales taxes, is shown at the very beginning of the ticket purchase process. CEO Michael Rapino has said that the switch to “all-in” pricing has proven to be a success, and the company has backed efforts to make all-in ticket pricing the law.

Despite this, the FTC alleges that “over the last decade, the first price the consumer has seen on Ticketmaster’s platform has almost never been the price the consumer pays.”

“According to internal Ticketmaster documents, the average percentage of fees charged on tickets ranges from 24% to 44% of the total price. From 2019 through 2024, consumers paid over $16.4 billion in mandatory fees on ticket purchases from Ticketmaster,” the complaint states.

The lawsuit is separate from the antitrust action that the US Department of Justice launched against Live Nation and Ticketmaster in May 2024. That lawsuit alleges that the company engaged in “monopolization and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry.”

The DOJ lawsuit is seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, undoing a years-old agreement that allowed the two to merge despite concerns over the company potentially enjoying monopoly power in the live entertainment business. The DOJ has accused Live Nation of violating the terms of that agreement.

In its new lawsuit, the FTC says Live Nation/Ticketmaster controls “roughly 80% or more of major concert venues’ primary ticketing for concerts and a growing share of ticket resales in the secondary market.”

As of 12pm ET on Thursday (September 18), Live Nation shares were down 3.6% on the New York Stock Exchange, trading at around $163.30 per share.Music Business Worldwide

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