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'Cybercrime crew' made $600K selling mostly stolen Taylor Swift tickets, Queens DA says
By
Catalina Gonella
Published Mar 3, 2025
Modified Mar 4, 2025
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Kate Green/Getty Images
By
Catalina Gonella
Published Mar 3, 2025
Modified Mar 4, 2025
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New York authorities said a “cybercrime crew” digitally swiped more than 900 event tickets owned by StubHub customers — mostly for the highly coveted Taylor Swift “Eras” tour — then resold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz’s office said on Monday that it had charged 31-year-old Shamara P. Simmons of Jamaica, Queens and 20-year-old Tyrone Rose of the country of Jamaica with grand larceny, computer tampering and conspiracy. The duo and two other people made more than $600,000 in profit from their scheme, prosecutors 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,” Katz said in a statement. “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.”
Rose worked in Kingston, Jamaica for StubHub subcontractor Sutherland, according to Katz’s office. Prosecutors said he and another accomplice, who hasn’t been arrested, used their access to StubHub’s computer system to get into a secure part of the network containing the URLs for sold tickets, which are meant to be sent to the legitimate purchasers.
But Rose and that other person instead redirected the emails containing the URLs to Simmons in Queens, and another Queens-based accomplice who has since died, Katz’s office said. They then downloaded the tickets, and posted them to StubHub and resold them for profit, prosecutors said.
StubHub told Gothamist by email that it had severed ties with Sutherland, refunded all orders for affected customers and strengthened its system security. The company said it notified law enforcement in Queens and Jamaica as soon as the issue was discovered, and that the Sutherland were quickly identified and fired.
Phone calls to numbers found online for the attorneys listed for Simmons and Rose were not answered.
Katz encouraged any Queens resident who may have been a victim of a cybercrime to contact her office’s cybercrimes team at 718-286-6673 or [email protected].
This story has been updated to reflect a statement from Stubhub
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