Alleged cyber scalpers Swiftly cuffed over $635K Taylor ticket heist
Police have made two arrests in their quest to start a cybercrime crew’s prison eras, alleging the pair stole hundreds of Taylor Swift tickets and sold them for huge profit.
Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara Simmons, 31, of Queens, New York City, were arrested on Thursday and charged with grand larceny and various computer tampering offenses.
Between June 2022 and July 2023, prosecutors claim the two allegedly exploited “a loophole” in an offshore ticketing system to steal more than 900 tickets for high-profile events, netting them $635,000 in total.
Investigators said they are still working to determine if the Swift ticket scam was a wider operation. However, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz claimed there were at least two people working in each location, Kingston and Queens.
Katz said: “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.
“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.”
The DA stated that two individuals, one of whom was Rose, were working at Sutherland, a third-party contractor for StubHub Jamaica, and alleged that Rose and the other unnamed person stole the ticket URLs and sent them to another two individuals operating out of Queens. The tickets were then sold on StubHub in the US for three-figure profit.
There wasn’t just “Bad Blood” in Taylor’s camp. The scalping operation is also said to have swiped tickets to Adele and Ed Sheeran shows, NBA matches, and the US Open tennis championships.
Rose and another suspect, who hasn’t yet been arrested, are alleged to have been behind the scam, allegedly abusing their access to StubHub’s network to “find a backdoor” into the system used to assign tickets their unique URLs. Once assigned a URL, the tickets were put into a queue before being emailed to purchasers, but prosecutors claim the pair allegedly redirected these emails to their crew in Queens: Simmons and another suspected accomplice, whom prosecutors say has since died.
Katz said, if found guilty, both Rose and Simmons face prison sentences of three to 15 years.
“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,” she said.
“I thank StubHub for alerting us to this important case and encourage any Queens resident who may have been a victim of a cybercrime to contact our Cyber Crimes team at 718-286-6673 or CyberCrimes@queensda.org.”
StubHub is very much “Still Standing” even after various other security snafus similar to this one. Back in 2014, for example, six people were charged over the purchase of Elton John tickets using payment details stored in customer accounts.
Another example of user card details being used to purchase tickets was seen in 2016 as a Russian operation allegedly breached more than 1,000 accounts to score a scamming home run with thousands of Yankee Stadium tickets, as well as Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z shows.
StubHub is one of the world’s most popular gig platforms with north of 300 million tickets available to purchase every year. Per the New York Times, it could be going public in the next few months. ®
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