FAMU AD arrested, accused of stealing $24K from former job
June 10 - Florida A&M athletic director Angela Suggs was arrested Monday on two felony counts related to putting $24,000 in personal expenses on a corporate credit card at her previous job.
Suggs, 55, is charged with grand theft and scheme to defraud, as well as four misdemeanor counts of false claims on travel vouchers. She turned herself in to authorities Monday at the Leon County (Fla.) Detention Facility.
Suggs posted a $13,500 bond and was released Monday afternoon.
Florida A&M hired Suggs as its new athletic director on a three-year, $750,000 contract just nine months ago.
"While the matter is unrelated to her duties as an employee at FAMU, we are monitoring the situation and will respond in the future as appropriate," FAMU interim president Timothy Beard said in a statement.
Prior to FAMU, Suggs worked as the president and CEO of the Florida Sports Foundation (FSF). An investigation began in November 2024 following an audit of Suggs' business credit card purchases, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
"The investigation revealed Suggs misused her FSF-issued credit card to make wire transfers and cash withdraws and personal purchases at casinos during business trips, totaling more than $24,000," the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said in a statement. "She then falsified travel vouchers, coding the unauthorized charges as meals.
"When asked about the unauthorized charges, Suggs claimed some were for business meals and others were accidentally charged to the business card. She failed to fully repay (the foundation) for her personal expenditures."
--Field Level Media
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During the case where he was convicted of fraud, Peter Hunter alleged that GetMeIn! - another Ticketmaster-owned company - offered him "incentives" for selling in bulk, such as £4,000 cashback if he hit sales of £550,000 over a three-month sources told us that some touts also sourced tickets directly through relationships with promoters and venues, but sales at Hunter's level were far beyond what any regular customer could acquire legitimately from primary ticketing though the primary ticketing companies were victims of the fraud - as their purchase limits were breached by the use of false identities - Mr Andrews said none of the primary ticketing companies "directly supported" the former employee who worked in Ticketmaster's resale technical team, who also wanted to remain anonymous, told the BBC his team would work closely with touts, developing software that helped them sell tickets in the secondary market."You have to build a relationship with them, they're like a customer basically," he said. The team would show touts products and ask for feedback, including if they made selling tickets easier for them and often showing them multiple versions, he said. Tip-offs, multiple accounts and fake names We have been told that resale sites would liaise with big sellers, like court, Hunter alleged a senior boss at GetMeIn! would help him by passing on information from Ticketmaster's legal department such as "government reports maybe from select committees" and ringing him weekly to tip him off about forthcoming sales before the public learned about senior employee had described in emails how he added a "new privilege" to the accounts of "top brokers" - the resale sites' term for touts - which would allow them to automatically "drip feed" large inventories of tickets on to the emails were read in court as evidence from Peter Hunter's defence team, suggesting that the senior GetMeIn! boss offered to help stop Hunter's tickets being cancelled by Ticketmaster when he had fallen foul of a purchase court heard that the senior employee had written: "I think Ticketmaster are looking at cancelling primary bookings that have exceeded the ticket limit. However, if I flag them as GMI [GetMeIn!], I should be able to save them." Hunter's defence alleged the correspondence showed the GetMeIn! boss knew the tout had multiple Ticketmaster accounts which he used to buy more tickets than the site's restrictions multiple names and identities to buy more tickets than the limit allowed was one of the reasons Hunter was jailed for the trial of the Ticket Queen, the prosecution said this same GetMeIn! boss and a colleague had both been "complicit or at least indifferent" in her use of a false name on the resale site to conceal the fact that the account belonged to a court heard that Maria Chenery-Woods had emailed the two men asking to change her account name from "Ticket Queen" to "Elsie Marshall" in February both court cases, the prosecution questioned why it was necessary for the accused to pretend to be other people to buy tickets if, as the defendants alleged, Ticketmaster knew what they were doing. How separate was Ticketmaster from its former resale sites? The links with touts such as Hunter went right to the highest levels of Ticketmaster's group of companies, according to emails read out in court as evidence. They record the same senior GetMeIn! boss proposing a meeting between Hunter and Selina Emeny, the company's top legal representative and a director of Live Nation Ltd, an arm of Ticketmaster's parent proposed meeting in 2015 was intended to "address any worries" Hunter might have about a change in the law around ticket resale and "brainstorm what more can be done by our legal team to help UK brokers".Ms Emeny is currently listed as an active director of 50 companies on Companies House, all related to Live Nation and maintained that its resale platforms, GetMeIn! and Seatwave, operated as "separate entities", in the words of then chairman Chris Edmonds at a 2016 House of Commons select committee both Mr Edmonds and Ms Emeny were directors of Ticketmaster UK Ltd and the holding company which owned Seatwave. Ms Emeny was also a director and secretary of GetMeIn! and at one time, all three companies operated out of the same open-plan office in central London. David Brown, who worked in Ticketmaster's technology teams between 2011 and 2017, also told the BBC the companies had close enough links that they could have found out who was buying tickets in bulk and putting them up for resale on Ticketmaster's other said Ticketmaster and its resale sites used "a lot of the same infrastructure" and it would have been easy to "link everything together". "You're not building completely separate databases," he said it meant Ticketmaster could have connected the accounts and credit cards originally purchasing tickets with those selling in bulk on resale sales, and stop them reselling."We should be able to pull enough data to say there's something not right about this, this isn't just members of the public selling tickets. If they wanted to really tackle the problem, they had all the tools in one place to do that," he Homann, who was the then resale managing director of Ticketmaster/GetMeIn!, said in 2014 to a group of MPs that "they are able to cross-reference" some tickets on GetMeIn! "against Ticketmaster's records" to report suspected frauds. The employee in Ticketmaster's resale technology team who developed software to help touts also told the BBC that there was a senior executive who had "oversight" over elements of the primary selling and resale side of the operation. That person could easily have accessed an internal list of top-selling brokers, the employee said the executive "would definitely ask that question, ask for that information. I can't believe that wouldn't be seen by him".Mr Edmonds, Ticketmaster's chairman in 2016, had told Parliament that the company did not have "visibility" over how the sellers on its resale platforms acquired those tickets - but these accounts suggest Ticketmaster could have found out if they were buying them on their own also asked the other two large resale ticketing platforms, Viagogo and Stubhub about their relationships with large sellers, including account managers and inventory management told us such facilities are "standard industry practice", but it "takes its responsibilities under the law very seriously". It said it had a business relationship with Hunter, Smith and two of the Ticket Queen's accomplices "before they were found to be guilty of any fraudulent activity"."Bad actors go against what we stand for and Viagogo is in full support of the legal action taken against them," the company International told the BBC, it is "fully compliant with UK regulations and provides industry-leading consumer protections." It added: "As a marketplace we provide a safe, trusted and transparent platform for the buying and selling of tickets, and enforce strict measures to protect consumers against fraud." Resale site staff were working for the touts Some employees of companies then owned by Ticketmaster were occasionally paid by touts to buy tickets on their behalf, the prosecution told the court in the Ticket Queen prosecution added the Ticket Queen's accomplices paid two GetMeIn! employees out of a separate bank account from the usual company one. According to a Skype message read in court, one accomplice said: "It will be best as it won't show a GMI employee being paid by TQ Tickets."One of her buyers was an employee at GetMeIn! who received £8,500 in less than a year from this sideline, the prosecution said. Our research found this employee's day job was to source replacement tickets when sellers failed to deliver, as they sometimes resale platforms would sometimes buy tickets from touts to fulfil orders in these circumstances, a SeatWave employee told the BBC. The touts would behave "like the mafia", and raise their prices when they knew the resale platform itself was in the market for tickets, the employee presented in court suggested help for the touts to buy tickets in bulk also came from another well-known company: American Express, which offers its cardholders privileged access to tickets for events through pre-sales. Promoters say sponsors like American Express are important in making events such as Formula One and British Summer Time Hyde Park Hunter told the court he had received a LinkedIn message out of the blue from a representative at the credit card company. The rep was offering "as many additional cards as you wanted" in the form of Platinum business credit cards with an "unlimited spend", according to Hunter. The Amex representative wrote that he was aware of Ticketmaster's purchasing limit of six tickets per day on each credit card and told Hunter "there are ways around this with American Express".The rep also suggested in an email to Peter Hunter that his vice-president at the company was "happy to waive card fees" and that the VP's "initial offer was to waive 15 card fees for £250k spend in the first two months".American Express told the BBC: "When we identify instances of misconduct, we investigate the issues raised and take appropriate steps to address them, including disciplinary action with employees as necessary." Has anything changed now? Ticketmaster announced the closure of its resale sites, GetMeIn! and Seatwave in 2018, months after Peter Hunter was charged. Now it allows resales through its main site instead and says prices are capped at the ticket's face Ticketmaster is now trying to "capture the value" of the resale market through different tiers of pricing for tickets labelled as "in demand" or "Platinum" tickets, as UK managing director Andrew Parsons told the House of Commons earlier this year."We think it is absolutely right that artists should be able to price a small amount of the tickets at a higher price to be able to keep overall prices down and capture some of that value away from the secondary market," he said. But ticket touts are still very much active. Minutes after Beyonce's first pre-sale started in February for the UK leg of her Cowboy Carter tour, hundreds of the tickets appeared on resale sites such as told us that "speculative listings" are not allowed on its platform and that it "[does] not support the use of bots which operate during sales on the primary market"."Although the primary platforms do say that they have measures in place to try and prevent touts buying large numbers of tickets, it's quite evident that that practice took place then and still takes place now," said Mr Andrews from National Trading he said "the current situation is that we're not funded or we haven't got sufficient resources to continue to pursue further touts". If you have information about this story that you would like to share please get in touch. Email ticketinginvestigation@ Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist.
