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. 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. 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. 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.