Torrey Pines Golf Course. (File photo courtesy of The Lodge at Torrey Pines)
If you play the Torrey Pines or Balboa Park golf courses, you’re probably aware of how difficult it is to get a good tee time, especially for slots on Thursday through Sunday from the early morning to noon.
It’s a common problem across municipal courses in Southern California, and a new federal indictment provides insight into the disappearance of weekend morning tee times within seconds of being released.
The possible reveal to the mystery of the vanishing tee times can be found in a grand jury document filed this month in Los Angeles, alleging that two men started a brokering business using digital devices to reserve thousands of tee times for resale at numerous golf courses nationwide.
In doing so, they allegedly created “a monopoly of Los Angeles and Orange County area golf course tee times by securing the most sought-after early morning slots, often within seconds of their release to the public.”
Golfers and industry experts had suspected bots were the culprit, but that wasn’t the case.
None of the 17 targeted Southern California courses are named in the indictment, but Ciaran McEvoy of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles confirmed for Times of San Diego that one of them was Torrey Pines Golf Course.
With most of the action focused on courses in Los Angeles and Orange counties, it’s still not clear how tee times at Balboa have been snapped up.
While the indictment notes that the practice often violated municipal regulations, it doesn’t involve federal law.
So why the federal indictment? In this case, the IRS opted for the “Al Capone” strategy, accusing the twin brothers who allegedly ran the operation of evading income taxes.
Se Youn Kim, aka Steve Kim, and Hee Youn Kim, aka Ted Kim, were indicted not for the core operation in question — creating a system to scoop up tee times — but what they allegedly did not do: pay $1.1 million in income taxes.
Instead of paying the taxes, the government says, that Steve Kim “spent his money on personal financial investments and luxury retail purchases, including from brands such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton.”
Brother Ted, says the IRS, spent his money on a timeshare in Hawaii, luxury vehicles and luxury retail purchases, including brands such as Cartier and Prada.
As many golfers who tried to get tee times at Torrey Pines could attest, “defendants made it more difficult and more expensive for members of the public to reserve tee times at these courses without paying the defendants an additional booking fee,” the indictment noted.
Golfers reportedly paid the Kims using Venmo and Zelle accounts.
The government says that the two men, who had worked as MRI technicians, began the scheme around 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the golfing industry, this was the time the sport experienced explosive growth as people looked for safe outdoor activities amid lockdowns.
The defendants allegedly marketed their venture and communicated with their golfing clients through social media platforms and KaKao Talk, a free instant message application, widely used in Korea and elsewhere.
There are no further details about the digital devices the men may have employed to pull off the scheme or if bots, capable of grabbing hours of tee times in less than a minute, were part of the plan.
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