3 foreigners jailed for using fake Ed Sheeran concert passes
Three foreigners who used fake Ed Sheeran concert passes to enter one of the English singer-songwriter’s concerts here earlier this month were sentenced to four weeks’ jail each on Tuesday (28 November).
New Zealanders Scott Fabian Anthony Penk, 34, and Michael Stanton Hardgrave, 30, and Briton Martin Joseph Keane, 60, were involved in two separate cases of fraud committed on 12 November. All three were here as tourists.
Each pleaded guilty to one count of using forged passes – which were supposedly issued by concert organiser AEG Presents Asia – to enter the Singapore Indoor Stadium (SIS) at around 7pm.
Tickets to the highly anticipated concerts – held on 11 and 12 November – were priced between $108 and $248, and were sold out within an hour of going on sale at the start of this month.
Penk and Hardgrave, who are friends, obtained a few sham passes from unknown persons outside the stadium prior to the concert on 12 November. The pair planned to use the passes to bring other people into the venue for a fee.
In total, the two brought seven people into the concert venue in batches with the fake passes. Neither was stopped by security officers, nor were they subjected to security checks. Penk and Hardgrave collected $1,050 in total from the people they snuck into the show. The pair were later caught by SIS staff who called the police.
In a separate case, Keane came to Singapore in October with the intention of buying and selling Ed Sheeran concert tickets. He planned the deed with Paul Cosgrove, who is expected to be charged in court with a similar offence. Another man, Briton Luke Simon McKay, 49, has been charged but is still under investigation.
On 11 November, the first day of the concert, both Cosgrove and Keane went to the stadium, where Cosgrove told Keane that he could obtain fake passes to enter the venue on the following day.
Cosgrove left for a while and returned with forged “Ed Sheeran All Area Access Family And Guests” passes. He told Keane that the passes could be used to bring others into the venue. Keane arranged with Paul to bring interested concertgoers into the stadium using the fake passes for a fee of between $250 and $350 each.
Keane brought four people in two batches into the venue on 12 November with the forged passes and collected $1,000 in total. He shared the money with Cosgrove and the pair spent it on drinks and their accommodations. Keane was stopped by an SIS security staff member on his third attempt to smuggle three more people into the venue.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Tow Chew Chi asked for a jail sentence of four weeks for each man, saying that the offences were premeditated and that the security of the venue was compromised as the people brought in were not checked.
In mitigation all three men, who did not have lawyers, apologised to the court. Penk said that the incident was “very embarrassing” and regretted his actions “100 per cent” while Keane said he was “ashamed” of what he had done. District Judge Hamidah Ibrahim told Penk it took 34 years of age before he realised that honesty was an important virtue.
For using a forged document as genuine knowingly, each man could have been jailed up to four years and/or fined.
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