Two people have been arrested and arraigned for their alleged role in stealing more than 900 concert tickets, most of which were for the Taylor Swift Eras Tour, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced on March 3.
Ticket URLs were allegedly stolen by two people working at a third-party contractor for StubHub in Kingston, Jamaica. Those stolen URLs were then emailed to two others in Jamaica, Queens, who downloaded them and sold them on StubHub for personal gain.
“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,” said Katz 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 of more than $600,000.”
She added: “This takedown highlights the vigilance of my office’s Cybercrime and Cryptocurrency Unit as well as the importance of working with our industry partners to combat fraudulent activities and ensure the protection of consumers.”
Tyrone Rose, 20, from Kingston and Shamara Simmons, 31, from Queens were arrested and arraigned on Thursday on charges of grand larceny in the second degree, computer tampering in the first degree, conspiracy in the fourth degree, and computer tampering in the fourth degree.
They have been ordered to return to court on March 7. If convicted, they could face three to fifteen years behind bars.
Katz noted that between June 2022 and July 2023, about 350 StubHub orders, encompassing about 993 tickets, were intercepted by the two individuals working at the third-party contractor Sutherland in Kingston. Rose was one of the employees, as well as an “unapprehended accomplice,” according to the press release from the office of the district attorney. They used their StubHub access to find a backdoor to a part of the network where sold tickets were given a URL and subsequently placed in a queue to be emailed to the buyer for download.
“Rose and his co-conspirator re-directed the URLs to the emails of co-conspirators Shamara Simmons in Queens and a now deceased accomplice who lived in Queens,” the press release stated.
The co-conspirators then allegedly downloaded the tickets from the URL, only to repost them on StubHub for personal gain, raking in $635,000.
“Most of the tickets stolen were for high value and high-profile events such as the Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Adele concerts, Ed Sheeran concerts, NBA games and the US Open Tennis Championships,” the office of the district attorney said.
