Taylor Swift was stolen by hackers for hundreds of concert tickets worth 16 billion, police arrested

According to Variety on February 5, the Queens District Attorney's Office, New York, announced that authorities arrested two hackers Tyrone Rose, Shamara P. Simmons, last Thursday. Both were convicted of aggravated theft, computer access, and conspiracy to commit a crime.

Rose and Simmons stole 993 Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Adele concert tickets and major events from online bookings belonging to the StubHub ticketing platform.

The office said Rose and another accomplice — who has not yet been arrested and whose identity has been revealed — worked for Sutherland Global Services, StubHub's third-party ticketing unit in Kingston, Jamaica's capital. The two took advantage of access to the StubHub system, seeking to compromise the security of the order information that they were not allowed to access.

According to the criminal complaint, Tyrone Rose was an employee of Sutherland Global Services, an outsourcing company that partnered with StubHub. Taking advantage of access to a part of the StubHub system, the fraud is carried out according to the procedure:

- Rose and his accomplices (who have not yet been arrested) gained unauthorized access to the booking system on StubHub.

- Each order has a unique URL for the buyer to download the ticket.

- Rose changes the mail in the system so that the edited URL goes to her accomplices, including Simmons.

- Recipients of stolen tickets resold on StubHub for profit.

Each ticket has its own URL, which is sent to the customer for download. They collected the URL and passed it on to Simmons and another person who is now deceased. After that, the team resold tickets on StubHub from June 2022 to July 2023.

Prosecutor Melinda Katz said: "They took advantage of the loophole of the overseas supplier to steal many of the biggest tour tickets of the past decade, then collected more than $600,000."

All affected orders have been refunded or replaced tickets. StubHub has terminated its relationship with Sutherland Global Services. Law enforcement agencies are still investigating to trace other accomplices.

Speaking to Variety, Mark Streams, StubHub's chief legal officer, said that when the criminal scheme was discovered, CTY reported the third party providing the tickets to fans was Sutherland, the Queens District Attorney's Office and law enforcement in Jamaica. They then fired the employees involved. "StubHub exchanges or refunds all affected tickets, strengthening security measures to protect fans and ticket agents," Mr. Streams added.

According to USA Today, the problem of hackers accessing the ticketing system took place recently. In May 2024, Live Nation Entertainment Company detected "unauthorized activities" in a third-party cloud database containing data from the Ticketmaster platform. At that time, the business was investigating a cybercrime group that collected information from more than 500 million Ticketmaster users.

A month later, Live Nation and Tickermaster were sued for leaking customer data due to negligence in security. In a filing with the Central District Court of California, information from hundreds of millions of people was sold on the dark web for $500,000. In October 2024, Ticketmaster continued to receive harshness for losing fans' tickets, costing them thousands of dollars. At that time, CTY blamed the hackers for causing the incident.

In addition, many viewers are scammed out of money when looking for intermediate tickets. According to The Guardian in April 2024, Lloyds Bank in the UK counted more than 600 customers who reported being deceived when buying tickets to Taylor Swift's show - more than any other artist. On average, each audience loses 332 pounds (10.5 million VND), in some cases up to more than 1,000 pounds (31.6 million VND). 90% of people transact with accounts of unknown origin on Facebook.

The Eras Tour is Taylor Swift's acclaimed international tour, which has grossed more than two billion USD. The tour includes 149 shows in 51 cities around the world. The concert series kicked off in Arizona, USA in March 2023, ending with Vancouver, Canada in December 2024. The average price of a ticket is $204 but spectators can pay about $1,652 if they buy the ticket again, according to Variety.

Taylor Swift spends $200 million to reward staff after world tour Trí Nhi15:25:43 10/12/2024According to People, the 34-year-old singer gave a generous sum of money in addition to his salary to his staff, including: dancers, choreographers, physical therapists, makeup and hair artists, stylists, band members, instrument technicians,