Two people were arrested and arraigned for stealing over 900 concert tickets from buyers and reselling them on StubHub for personal profit, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced earlier this week. A majority of the tickets were for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara P. Simmons, 31, of Queens, New York, were each charged with grand larceny, computer tampering, and conspiracy and computer tampering, according to the announcement. The district attorney alleged that the two were part of a cyber crime crew responsible for the massive series of thefts beginning in June of 2022.
Katz said the crew “exploited a loophole through an offshore ticket vendor to steal tickets” to what she described as “the biggest concert tour of the last decade,” along with other big events, to make an “extraordinary profit.”
Approximately 993 tickets from “high profile and high value events,” including the Eras tour and the U.S. Tennis Open, were compromised from the StubHub computer system between June 2022 and July 2023, according to a criminal complaint obtained by HuffPost.
Detectives from the district attorney’s office said Rose and another unnamed accomplice were employed with Jamaica-based tech company Sutherland Global Services, which was contracted with StubHub at the time of the thefts, according to the complaint.
The employees used their access to StubHub’s computer system to redirect unique ticket URLs, which would have been sent to the purchaser, to emails belonging to Simmons and another accomplice in Queens, New York. The people who originally made the purchase then never received their tickets.
Simmons and the other accomplice would then download the tickets from the redirected URL before posting them back on StubHub to resell at higher value, according to the complaint. They made approximately $635,000 from the scheme.
Simmons’ attorney, Boris Nektalov, told HuffPost his client is innocent and is “anxiously awaiting to fight these allegations in court.”
StubHub told HuffPost that it has terminated its relationship with Sutherland Global Services, and that Rose and the co-conspirator are no longer employed with the contractor.
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“Upon discovering this criminal scheme, we immediately reported it to the third-party customer service vendor, Sutherland Global Services (SGS), as well as to the Queens District Attorney’s Office and Jamaican law enforcement,” StubHub said in a statement. “The individuals involved, employees of SGS, exploited a system vulnerability to fraudulently resell tickets. They were swiftly identified and terminated.”
The company added that it “replaced or refunded all identified orders impacted, and strengthened security measures to further protect our fans and sellers.”