Hackers stole $635,000 in Taylor Swift ticket scheme, Queens DA says

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 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.

Rose and Simmons were both charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree computer tampering, fourth-degree conspiracy and fourth-degree computer tampering.

Rose worked for an outsourcing company in Kingston, Sutherland Global Services, which was contracted by StubHub, according to the criminal complaint.

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. Rose and his co-worker were able to alter the email account information for the orders, redirecting the URLs to accomplices, including 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, NBA games and the U.S. Open, the complaint said.

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