Workers at a BPO in Jamaica have been implicated a multi-national dollar fraud in which, according to a USA Today report, "cybercrime crew" stole nearly 1,000 concert tickets to several major events and then resold them for more than US$600,000 in about one year.
The events for which the tickets were obtained included the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other high-profile events on StubHub, New York, prosecutors revealed.
As a result of the fraud, StubHub has terminated its relationship with Sutherland Global Services, one of the largest BPOs in operating in Jamaica.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz announced Monday that the scheme involved people working in Kingston, Jamaica, for a third-party contractor partnered with StubHub, a ticket exchange and resale company.
The contractors allegedly stole ticket URLs and then emailed them to two co-conspirators in Queens, New York, according to Katz.
The co-conspirators downloaded the tickets and resold them on StubHub at inflated prices for personal profit, Katz added. The majority of the tickets stolen were for the highly coveted Eras Tour — which became the highest-grossing tour of all time after amassing over $2.7 billion in ticket sales last year.
Some of the tickets stolen were also for other major events, such as Adele and Ed Sheeran concerts, NBA games, and the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, according to Katz.
Authorities in New York arrested two persons involved in the scheme last Thursday, Katz said. Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara Simmons, 31, of Jamaica, Queens, were charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree and fourth-degree computer tampering, and fourth-degree conspiracy.
Rose and Simmons are expected to return to court on Friday, according to Katz. They each face a maximum sentence of three to 15 years in prison if convicted of the top count.
Katz added that the investigation remains ongoing to "determine the extent of this operation, including other potential co-conspirators."
She disclosed that the investigation showed that during the period June 2022 to July 2023, about 350 StubHub orders that amounted to roughly 993 tickets were intercepted by two people working for Sutherland Global Services in Jamaica, according to Katz.
The Sutherland Global Services employees, identified as Rose and an unapprehended accomplice, allegedly used their access to StubHub's computer system to access a secure area for tickets already sold and queued to be emailed to the purchaser to download, Katz said.
Rose and his accomplice then allegedly re-directed the URLs to the email accounts of Simmons and another New York accomplice who is now dead, according to Katz. The pair downloaded the tickets from the re-routed URLs and resold them on StubHub.
Katz said the overall proceeds from the scheme were valued at US$635,000.
StubHub told USA TODAY on Tuesday that the company identified all orders affected by the scheme and either replaced or fully refunded the orders.
"Upon discovering this criminal scheme, we immediately reported it to the third-party customer service vendor, Sutherland Global Services (SGS), as well as to the Queens District Attorney’s Office and Jamaican law enforcement," Mark Streams, chief legal officer at StubHub, said in a statement. "The individuals involved, employees of SGS, exploited a system vulnerability to fraudulently resell tickets. They were swiftly identified and terminated."
SOURCE: USA Today
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