Two people have been charged with stealing and reselling tickets to Taylor Swift concerts. Photo / Getty Images
Two people have been charged with stealing and reselling tickets to Taylor Swift concerts. Photo / Getty Images
Two people, including a former employee of a StubHub vendor, have been arrested and arraigned last week in New York for allegedly pocketing over $600,000 (NZ$1,046,118) from stealing and reselling tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and other popular concerts.
The Queens County district attorney’s office said Tyrone Rose, 20, from Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara Simmons, 31, based in Jamaica, Queens,werecharged with grand larceny, computer tampering and conspiracy over their alleged involvement in a year-long cybercrime scheme.
Each could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charge. An attorney for Rose and Simmons could not immediately be reached.
The hacking scheme allegedly lasted from June 2022 to July 2023, overlapping with presales for Swift’s immensely popular Eras Tour, demand for which caused Ticketmaster’s website to crash.
Tickets were being resold for an average of $1,611 (NZ$2,809) apiece on SeatGeek.
Huge demand for Taylor Swift tickets caused Ticketmaster to crash. Photo / Getty Images
Rose, a former employee for StubHub vendor Sutherland, was accused of helping to redirect the web links for roughly 350 StubHub ticket orders - which amounted to nearly 1,000 purchased concert tickets.
The criminal complaint states that links were emailed to Simmons and a now-deceased accomplice in Queens, who allegedly downloaded the tickets and resold them on StubHub, making a profit of about $635,000 (NZ$1,107,141.55).
“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 expensive of others,” Queens County District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement.
“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.”
“StubHub has since replaced or refunded all identified orders impacted and strengthened security measures to further protect our fans and sellers,” the online ticket provider’s chief legal officer, Mark Streams, said in a statement.
The affected tickets, which were mostly from Swift’s Eras Tour but also included sales for Adele and Ed Sheeran concerts, NBA games and the US Open tennis championships among other events, call to mind the challenges live music and sports fans face when hunting down tickets to watch their favorite entertainers.
The DC attorney general filed a lawsuit against StubHub in July that accuses the company of violating local consumer-protection laws by employing “drip pricing,” or slipping in surprise fees in the later stages of a lengthy purchase process.
StubHub pushed back against the allegations, saying its practices are “consistent with the law, our competitors’ practices, and the broader e-commerce sector”.
In May, the US government filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, calling for the company to “break up” amid accusations that it monopolised the ticket and concert industries, giving it unrivaled power to increase concert prices and obscure ticket fees.
Skyrocketing ticket costs haven’t stopped fans from shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars to enjoy live entertainment.
The Eras Tour, for example, was the first billion-dollar-grossing tour in history. And it’s become increasingly common for concertgoers to travel across the United States or to other parts of the world to see big names such as Beyoncé and Luke Combs perform.
