“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 expensive [sic] 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 of more than $600,000.”
Per the D.A.’s press release, the two Sutherland employees found “a backdoor into a secure area of the network where already sold tickets were given a URL and queued to be emailed to the purchaser to download.” The Sutherland employees intercepted these tickets and redirected them to their co-conspirators to list on StubHub themselves. The press release claims that “between June 2022 and July 2023, approximately 350 StubHub orders, resulting in approximately 993 tickets” were stolen. In addition to the Eras Tour, the hackers also stole tickets to Adele concerts, Ed Sheeran concerts, NBA games and the US Open Tennis Championships.
Swift’s team worked with Ticketmaster to put pretty stringent limits on ticket buying so as to prevent scalping. According to a 2023 Billboard report, “Ticketmaster announced that less than 5% of the approximately 5 million tickets sold for the tour ended up being listed on secondary markets.” StubHub estimated that 83% of The Eras Tour tickets on its site were sold by fans rather than ticket brokers as the resale tickets “were coming from new accounts with no record of past sales.” And Eras Tour tickets were infamously going at a premium: “A ticket with a face value under $150 could fetch $1,700, while tickets close to the stage were going for as high as $10,000.”
Small wonder, then, that the overall illicit gains by the hacker-scalper-thieves are valued at $635,000. One unidentified co-conspirator has gone “unapprehended,” while another has died since the ticket heist took place. The individuals arrested have been charged with grand larceny in the second degree, computer tampering in the first degree, conspiracy in the fourth degree and computer tampering in the fourth degree; they now face a potential maximum sentence of three to 15 years in prison if convicted.
