Hackers Stole $635,000 in Taylor Swift Ticket Scheme, Queens D.A. Says

New York Times

05-03-2025

Two people accused of stealing and reselling more than 900 tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other marquee events are facing criminal charges for their role in the scheme, New York prosecutors said.
Several people were involved in hacking into the computer system of the online ticket-sales platform StubHub starting in the summer of 2022, the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said in a news release on Monday. They then resold the tickets on the same platform for a profit, which added up to $635,000.
Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara P. Simmons, 31, of the New York City neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, were arrested and arraigned on Feb. 27 in Criminal Court in Queens. The lawyers listed for them in court documents did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Rose and Ms. Simmons were both charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree computer tampering, fourth-degree conspiracy and fourth-degree computer tampering.
Mr. Rose worked for an outsourcing company in Kingston, Sutherland Global Services, which was contracted by StubHub, according to the criminal complaint.
Mr. Rose and a co-worker, who has not been arrested or publicly identified, used their access to part of StubHub's ticketing system to find a way into a secure part of the network that they were not authorized to use, where information about ticket orders was stored.
Each order was given a unique web address, or URL, that was sent to the ticket buyers, who would then use the link to download their ticket. Mr. Rose and his co-worker were able to alter the email account information for the orders, redirecting the URLs to accomplices, including Ms. Simmons and a person in Queens who has since died, the criminal complaint said.
The recipients of the stolen URLs would download the tickets and resell them for profit on StubHub, according to the complaint. Between June 2022 and July 2023, the group intercepted about 350 StubHub orders for approximately 993 tickets.
Most of the tickets were for expensive events, including the Eras Tour, concerts by Adele and Ed Sheeran, N.B.A. games and the U.S. Open, the complaint said.
Mark Streams, StubHub's chief legal officer, said in a statement that once the company spotted the scheme, it reported it to Sutherland Global Services, Ms. Katz's office and law enforcement in the country of Jamaica.
'The individuals involved, employees of S.G.S., exploited a system vulnerability to fraudulently resell tickets,' Mr. Streams said. 'They were swiftly identified and terminated.'
Mr. Streams said that StubHub had replaced or refunded all orders affected by the scheme and strengthened its security measures.
StubHub said it has ended its relationship with Sutherland Global Services, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Katz said in a statement on Monday that the charges showed that Mr. Rose and Ms. Simmons, who are due in court on March 7, 'tried to use the popularity of Taylor Swift's concert tour and other high-profile events to profit' at the expense of others.
The investigation into the ticket theft — including the extent of the operation and others who were potentially involved — is ongoing, prosecutors said.
The Eras Tour lasted 21 months and sold more than $2 billion in tickets. The frenzy for tickets led to exorbitant prices on the resale market and left fans vulnerable to scammers.
In Canada, two people were arrested in recent months in connection with a ticket scam that Toronto police said cost Taylor Swift fans nearly $70,000, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the country's public broadcaster. One person was accused of posting tickets for sale on Facebook Marketplace but never delivering the tickets to the buyers.
In Britain, Lloyds Banking Group said last year that more than 600 of its customers had reported that they were victims of an Eras Tour ticket scam and that each person had lost an average of 332 pounds, or $427. The bank said it estimated that 3,000 people in Britain were victims of those scams, based on how many of its customers were affected.