Two people were arrested and charged in a scheme to steal and resell online tickets for Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour,” making over $600,000 in the process, the Queens, New York, prosecutor’s office said.
Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara Simmons, 31, of the Jamaica section of Queens, New York, were arrested on charges of grand larceny, conspiracy and computer tampering last week, the Queens District Attorney’s Office said Monday.
The tickets were stolen from StubHub by two people working for a third-party contractor in Kingston, the district attorney’s office said in a statement.
The URLs for the tickets were then sent to Queens, where Simmons and another person who has since died downloaded them and re-sold them on StubHub, the office said.
Around 350 StubHub orders, resulting in the theft of around 993 tickets, were hijacked in the cybercrime scheme, prosecutors said.
Most were for Taylor Swift’s massively popular “Eras Tour,” the office said.
Rose was one of the two people who allegedly worked in Jamaica and stole the tickets by re-directing URLs that were supposed to be sent to people who legitimately bought them, the district attorney’s office said.
Simmons and the now-deceased person is accused of working on the Queens side of the scheme, which occurred between June 2022 and July 2023.
While the “Eras Tour” made up most of the tickets that were stolen, other stolen tickets included entry to performances by Adele and Ed Sheeran, as well as NBA games and the US Open Tennis Championships, the district attorney’s office said.
The stolen tickets were worth around $635,000, prosecutors said.
StubHub notified Queens prosecutors, the third-party vendor where the two Jamaican members of the scheme worked, and Jamaican law enforcement as soon as it identified the thefts, Mark Streams, chief legal officer at StubHub, said.
“StubHub has since replaced or refunded all identified orders impacted and strengthened security measures to further protect our fans and sellers,” Streams said.
StubHub said it has terminated its relationship with the third-party vendor involved.
Rose and Simmons were arrested and arraigned in court in New York on Thursday. They are each charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree computer tampering, fourth-degree conspiracy and fourth-degree computer tampering, the district attorney’s office said.
Attorneys listed in court records as representing Rose and Simmons either could not be reached Tuesday evening or did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Swift’s “Eras Tour” grossed $2 billion worldwide over 21 months, Taylor Swift Touring confirmed to The New York Times and Variety in December.
