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Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time by a mile over the course of 2 years, 51 cities, and 5 continents. Tickets soared to astronomical prices thanks in no small part to scalpers who priced out millions of fans from attending.
But in some instances, the ‘scalpers’ were running elaborate fake ticket scams that siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars from Swifties who just wanted to see Taylor on stage. Now, the DA for Queens, NY, Melinda Katz, has filed charges against 2 individuals accused of running a ticket scam by exploiting a loophole through an overseas ticket vendor.
In a press release announcing the charges, the DA’s office claims the duo stole the URLs to over 900 concert tickets, the vast majority of which were Eras Tour tickets. Those ticket URLs (e-tickets) were then transferred to co-conspirators in Jamaica where they re-sold the tickets on StubHub where they made over $600K from the scam.
The DA’s office lays out the Eras Tour ticket scam in their press release. It involved 350 StubHub orders for a total of 993 tickets. These tickets “were intercepted by two individuals working for a third-party contractor in Kingston, Jamaica, called Sutherland.”
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According to the charges, the Sutherland employees found a backdoor into StubHub’s system that allowed them to see already sold tickets and scrape the corresponding URLs/barcodes from those tickets before the tickets were sent/received by the purchaser and were instead re-routed to defendants Tyrone Rose and Shamara P. Simmons.
If convicted, the face between 3 and 15 years in prison after being arraigned 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.
Within the press release, it is not abundantly clear if the StubHub users who purchased Eras Tour tickets but never received them because they were rerouted and resold were refunded their money. Presumably, they were. But this had to have been a logistical nightmare for StubHub trying to track down all of the moving parts and thankfully the Queens DA’s Cyber Crimes unit was able to get involved and find some answers.