Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, among event tickets 2 charged with stealing, reselling on StubHub

Two suspects are facing charges for what the Queens District Attorney’s Office said Monday is the cybertheft of more than 900 concert and event tickets, including those for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, later resold on StubHub for over $600,000 in profit.

Authorities said one of the defendants worked for Sutherland, a third-party contractor in Kingston, Jamaica, and along with a yet-to-be-apprehended accomplice, used stolen ticket URLs to funnel 993 tickets to two co-conspirators in Queens. The tickets were allegedly stolen between June 2022 and July 2023 and led to 350 StubHub orders totaling $635,000, officials said.

One of the Queens co-conspirators is now dead, authorities said.

Arrested were Shamara P. Simmons, of Jamaica, Queens, and Tyrone Rose, of Kingston, Jamaica, the district attorney’s office said.

Both defendants were charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree and fourth-degree computer tampering, and fourth-degree conspiracy.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of 3-to-15 years in prison for a conviction on the top count, the district attorney’s office said.

Court records show Simmons was arraigned Thursday in Queens Criminal Court before Judge Anthony M. Battisti and entered a not guilty plea. Rose was arraigned Friday before Judge Sharifa M. Nasser-Cuellar and also entered a plea of not guilty. Simmons, represented by Legal Aid, was released on his own recognizance, while Rose, represented at arraignment by a public defender, was released with “nonmonetary conditions.”

Both are due back in court Friday, records indicate.

In a statement Monday, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said Rose and the accomplice, while employed by Sutherland, used their access to the StubHub computer system to enter “a secure area of the network” where previously sold tickets were given a URL and “queued to be emailed to the purchaser” for download, then redirected those URLs to Simmons and a co-conspirator in Queens.

The rerouted tickets were then posted back to StubHub for resale, the district attorney’s office said.

Most of the tickets were for “high value and high-profile events” such as the Eras Tour, as well as concerts by Adele and Ed Sheeran, NBA games and the U.S. Open Tennis Championships at Flushing Meadow. Other than the tennis venue, the district attorney’s office did not detail what arena and stadium sites were targeted as part of the illegal ticket scheme.

As Katz said in a statement Monday: “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 district attorney’s office asked anyone who believes they’ve been a victim of this or another cybercrime to contact its Cyber Crimes team at 718-286-6673 or via email at CyberCrimes@queensda.org.