Former Ticketmaster boss sentenced for hacking rival firm CrowdSurge

A former Ticketmaster boss has been sentenced for illegally accessing a rival firm’s pc servers to steal data.

British citizen Stephen Mead stole delicate information between 2013 and 2015 from CrowdSurge, a smaller enterprise the place he had beforehand labored.

Meade pleaded responsible in June to conspiracy to commit pc intrusions into CrowdSurge. He’s presently ordered to pay a forfeiture tremendous of $67,970 (roughly £52,000) and sentenced to at least one yr of supervised launch.

In court docket paperwork filed by the state, Ticketmaster executives requested Meade to share “aggressive intelligence” concerning the firm.

Ticketmaster, which describes itself because the world’s largest leisure ticketing platform, didn’t reply to the BBC’s request for remark.

Zeeshan Zaidi, one other former Ticketmaster government, additionally pleaded responsible to fraud costs in 2019 of conspiring to commit pc intrusion and wire fraud.

Mead was ordered to repay a sum he obtained when he left CrowdSurge, in addition to a subsequent increase he obtained at Ticketmaster.

A spokesman for the Overseas Workplace advised the BBC: “We’re offering consular help to a British man in the USA and are liaising with native authorities.”

CrowdSurge, an internet site the place artists can promote advance tickets to followers, is a rival ticketing firm to Ticketmaster and is headquartered in London with U.S. workplaces in New York. U.S. court docket paperwork say the corporate is valued at greater than $100 million.

Since 2010, Mead has served as CrowdSurge’s senior vice chairman of worldwide operations and normal supervisor of North America.

Courtroom paperwork seen by the BBC present that when Mead left CrowdSurge in July 2012, he signed a “separation settlement” which stipulated that he should not retain or share any confidential data, together with consumer lists and advertising methods, with any third celebration .

The settlement additionally prohibited Mead from working for an additional ticketing firm for a yr, and CrowdSurge paid Mead roughly $52,970 as a part of the association, in response to court docket paperwork.

However court docket paperwork say he repeatedly violated the separation settlement.

In the summertime of 2013, Mead was employed by Reside Nation, Ticketmaster’s mum or dad firm, as a part of the TicketWeb division.

Prosecutors stated CrowdSurge pc server logs confirmed that between August 2013 and December 2015, its firm information was accessed no less than 25 instances by computer systems with IP addresses registered by Ticketmaster and its associates in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. .

Prosecutors allege that Mead shared a CrowdSurge spreadsheet containing monetary data and passwords with out permission and obtained aggressive details about the corporate’s prospects and expertise on the request of Ticketmaster executives.

He additionally offered data to different Ticketmaster staff that gave them entry to password-protected CrowdSurge data. He steered they “take screenshots from the system” and mentioned “deleting”[ting] “Get off CrowdSurge’s knee,” court docket paperwork state.

In addition they say that on one event, at Zaidi’s request, Mead gave a presentation to no less than 14 Reside Nation and Ticketmaster executives and staff, throughout which he gained unauthorized entry to their web sites utilizing a CrowdSurge username and password. Throughout the presentation, which was projected onto a big display within the convention room, Mead confirmed off CrowdSurge’s customized product known as Artists’ Toolbox, a web-based information evaluation package deal for music artists.

Throughout his tenure, Meade additionally shared real-time ticket gross sales information and the identities of performers working with CrowdSurge.

Ticketmaster used the knowledge to plan aggressive responses to win advance ticketing enterprise and examine services, the DOJ stated. It added that Meade’s actions resulted in CrowdSurge’s financial losses, which have been “notably extreme in a extremely aggressive enterprise setting”.

Meade was later reportedly promoted to director of consumer providers for Ticketmaster Artist Companies in early 2015, reporting on to Zaidi. He additionally obtained a increase.

Courtroom paperwork allege that Meade didn’t have interaction in felony conduct to achieve private profit from the scheme aside from the advantage of growing his fame and standing inside Ticketmaster.

CrowdSurge found Mead’s hacking after a former Ticketmaster government began working for the corporate in 2015 and alerted them to modifications in how the system was accessed.

Round October 2017, Reside Nation and Ticketmaster terminated Mead’s employment.

Courtroom paperwork present that Mead left the USA in 2019 and returned to the UK. He was arrested in Italy earlier this yr and extradited to the USA.

In 2015, CrowdSurge’s mum or dad firm, Full Leisure Assets, filed a civil lawsuit in opposition to Ticketmaster, accusing it of dominating the market and “trying to undermine competitors available in the market for artist pre-sale ticketing providers in quite a lot of alternative ways.”

These embody “blocking” quite a few artists from working with SongKick (the corporate CrowdSurge merged with in June 2015) and utilizing its market energy to “power” them to work with Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster and SongKick settled their authorized dispute in 2018, with Ticketmaster paying $110 million to SongKick’s house owners and buying SongKick’s ticketing expertise for an undisclosed quantity.

Ticketmaster entered right into a deferred prosecution settlement with the New York Division of Justice after pleading responsible to 5 fraud costs in 2020. pause.

The ticketing big was fined $10 million and agreed to “modify or preserve its present compliance program as vital and acceptable.”

The U.S. Division of Justice confirmed that Ticketmaster accomplished the phrases of the deferred prosecution in July 2024.