The US Department of Justice has announced that Ticketmaster has been fined $10 million for repeatedly accessing a competitor’s computer systems.
A former employee of ticketing company CrowdSurge, a firm that provided services for running and managing ticket sales on behalf of artists, lies at the centre of the case.
Although not named by the Department of Justice in its legal documents about the case, the media has named the man as Stephen Mead.
In 2012 Mead left CrowdSurge, signing a separation agreement worth $52,970 that he would not disclose or retain confidential information from Crowdsurge such as client lists, passwords, marketing strategies, and financial information.
Mead subsequently joined Ticketmaster, where he is said to have shared sensitive information including usernames and passwords with his new colleagues that allowed them to unlawfully access business information including data on purchases of presale tickets through his former employer.
According to the Department of Justice, the former CrowdSurge employee told his fellow workers to:
“screen-grab the hell out of the system”
but also warned:
“I must stress that as this is access to a live [victim company] tool I would be careful in what you click on as it would be best not [to] giveaway that we are snooping around.”
Astonishingly, on one occasion, at an Artist Services Summit in San Francisco, a password-protected area of Crowdsu ..
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