Cybercrime Crew Stole Taylor Swift Tickets & Made $600K Profit — Report
A cybercrime crew stole and resold Taylor Swift's Eras Tour tickets. As per Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, the crew stole over 993 tickets and resold them on StubHub, amassing approximately over $635,000. The theft took place between June 2022 and July 2023.
The District Attorney further explained the operation of the reported theft. According to Katz' office, two StubHub subcontractors working for a third-party firm called Sutherland in Kingston, Jamaica, took the ticket URLs and emailed them to their co-conspirators in Queens.
Apart from Taylor Swift's concert tickets, the crew also resold tickets for Adele and Ed Sheeran concerts, NBA games, and the U.S. Open Tennis Championships. The attorney's office has identified two of the co-conspirators, Tyrone Rose and Shamara Simmons.
Both the accused people have faced arrest. Their charges include grand larceny in the second degree, conspiracy in the fourth degree, and computer tampering in the first and fourth degrees.
As per the latest update from the prosecutors, Rose and Simmons have pleaded 'not guilty.' They will appear before the court again on March 7. The attorney's office further revealed that the duo had an alleged accomplice. But the third individual has since passed away.
The district attorney explained, 'According to the charges, these defendants tried to use the popularity of Taylor Swift's concert tour and other high-profile events to profit at the expense of others. They allegedly exploited a loophole through an offshore ticket vendor to steal tickets to the biggest concert tour of the last decade and then resold those seats for an extraordinary profit of more than $600,000.'
Stubhub has also released a separate statement regarding the third-party firm. The ticketing platform noted: 'StubHub has since replaced or refunded all identified orders impacted.' Their official statement also reassured on strengthening security measures to further protect our fans and sellers.'
Originally reported by Arpita Adhya on ComingSoon.
The post Cybercrime Crew Stole Taylor Swift Tickets & Made $600K Profit — Report appeared first on Mandatory.
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'If you have sweeping prohibitions on that type of a bet, you're taking away the ability for your league to ensure the integrity of that activity,' said Joe Maloney, a senior vice president for strategic communications at the American Gaming Association. 'You will not have the ability to work with an integrity monitor to identify any irregular betting activity on such a legal market. You will not have the collaboration of a legal operator who will share that information. You will not have the collaboration of a legal operator to say to them, 'Here's the do-not-fly list for betting activity for our league: employees, club employees, trainers, athletic officials, referees,' etc. ... 'Betting engagement on prop bets is largely a reflection of fandom. And so, by pushing that away, I think you absolutely lose the ability to properly oversee it and to root out the bad actors that would seem to exploit it. Because it will still take place.' In 2022, legal sports betting accounted for $6.8 billion in legal revenue, while illegal sports betting accounted for about $3.8 billion, according to research from the American Gaming Association, a trade association. Last year, it estimated that revenue from legal sports betting rose to $16 billion, while the illegal market grew to about $5 billion. A 2024 analysis by the International Betting Integrity Association, a nonprofit integrity firm made up of licensed gambling operators, questioned the efficacy of restricting prop bets. The IBIA reported that 59 out of 360,000 basketball games that had been offered for betting from 2017 to 2023 were 'the subject of suspicious betting.' 'There was no suspicious betting activity linked to match manipulation identified on player prop markets,' the IBIA report said. 'There is no meaningful integrity benefit from excluding such markets, which are widely available globally. Prohibiting those products will make offshore operators more attractive.' By persuading its partners to keep some prop bets off the books, the NBA nonetheless provided a precedent for how to remove bets leagues have considered, to use Manfred's term, 'unnecessary.' Would MLB, amid an ongoing investigation into two pitchers, follow? Unlike the NBA, MLB doesn't have easily defined classifications of contracts such as 10-day and two-way players. One method could instead be to target so-called first-pitch microbets. MLB is having 'ongoing conversations' related to gambling, according to a person with knowledge of the league's thinking. If baseball were to make such a push against microbets, its reasoning might mirror the NBA's last year, said Gill Alexander, a longtime sports betting commentator for VSiN. 'I think basically baseball's point would be, you know, this is the type of prop that is just begging for trouble, right?' Alexander said. Ohio, for one, would most likely agree. Last month, Gov. Mike DeWine asked the Ohio Casino Control Commission to ban prop bets on 'highly specific events within games that are completely controlled by one player," he said in a news release, while asking the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, WNBA and MLS commissioners to support his stance. 'The prop betting experiment in this country has failed badly,' DeWine said. Alexander said: 'I do think that we're in the era now where these leagues can exert some influence on these sports books, as long as it is of no financial pain to the sports books. This is one of these instances where, really, I don't agree with Rob Manfred every day, but I actually think he's probably going to get what he wants here.'
