In the US, two employees of a ticket company have been arrested after they intercepted digital tickets and then resold them on the same platform for exorbitant profits.

The two are said to have made a profit of around $635,000 from the theft of 993 tickets. These were mainly tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, but tickets for NBA games or the US Open were stolen. Their operation ran from June 2022 to July 2023

The tickets themselves were purchased from the ticketing site StubHub. Anyone who does this is assigned a URL in the ticketing system for each ticket sold. This way, they can easily find the ticket when the event occurs.

Two employees of Sutherland, a subcontractor of ticket seller StubHub, managed to find a backdoor in the systems from the Jamaican capital Kingston to forward the URLs of already-sold tickets to two accomplices, who resold them on StubHub from the US at exorbitant prices.

The case is remarkable because it involves fraud by two employees. People who bought tickets legally and usually reliably still had no real ticket. The two risk up to fifteen years in prison for their operation.