Ticketmaster has agreed to pay $ 10 million for breaking into a competing network. The company and its parent Live Nation acknowledged that they had hired a former employee of a rival ticket seller CrowdSurge, and then used his knowledge – including old usernames and passwords – to learn and cut the inner workings of CrowdSurge. [the company] down on the knees. ”
“Ticketmaster employees have repeatedly – and illegally – accessed a competitor’s computers without authorization using stolen passwords to illegally collect business information,” said U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme. “Furthermore, Ticketmaster’s employees held a ‘whole’ section where stolen passwords were used to gain access to the victim’s computers. ‘
The burglary allegations were reported in 2017 after CrowdSurge (which merged with another company called Songkick) sued Live Nation for antitrust violations. According to court documents and previous reports, in 2013, Live Nation hired a former CrowdSurge employee named Stephen Mead. Then the now-fired CEO of Ticketmaster, Zeeshan Zaidi and other executives, encouraged him to hand over the secrets of his old employer. This included logging in to analytics pages for artist management businesses, to get a window into CrowdSurge’s operations. Ticketmaster even presented a ‘product review’ of its much smaller competitor at a 2014 summit and asked Mead to sign up and demonstrate its capabilities in a presentation.
In addition to the actual password theft, Mead also revealed that his old employer used unprotected but hard-to-find preview links for ticket pages. Ticketmaster collected a spreadsheet of every ticket page he could find so that artists using the service could identify and “withhold” it.
Ticketmaster apparently lost access to the system by 2015, the same year CrowdSurge merged with Songkick. Songkick sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for violating antitrust laws. But he soon sold or closed his services, and in 2018 he accepted a $ 110 million settlement – plus an unknown amount to sell some of his remaining assets to Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster expressed satisfaction with the result in a statement. “Ticketmaster terminated Zaidi and Mead in 2017 after their behavior came to light. Their actions are contrary to our corporate policies and do not conflict with our values. “We are pleased that this matter has now been resolved,” a spokesman said. The edge.
In today’s ruling, prosecution is repelled in terms of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Ticketmaster must pay the fine in question, maintain clear policies to detect and prevent unauthorized computer intrusion, and submit annual reports on its conduct for the next three years.
Updated 18:20 ET: Statement from Ticketmaster added.