According to the BBC, after pleading guilty to stealing and selling unreleased music by artists like Coldplay and Shawn Mendes, a 22-year old woman was sentenced to 21 months in prison.
Selling the stolen music on the dark web for an estimated $52,000, Skylar Dalziel was accused of hacking cloud storage accounts linked to various artists between April 2021 and January 2023.
Dalziel was charged with, and later pleaded guilty to, eleven copyright offenses for selling items without a license from the owner, one count of transferring criminal property, and three counts of acquiring, using, or possessing criminal property. On top of the prison sentence, shel’ll also have to complete 180 hours of unpaid work.
After the police captured Dalziel in 2023, they said her hard drives contained about 290,000 tracks, including repertoire by other artists like Melanie Martinez, Upsahl, and Bebe Rexha.
Authorities found a spreadsheet detailing the track transactions, as well as PayPal and bank account statements showing how much Dalziel was paid. According to the authorities, some of the funds were transferred to bank accounts in the United States and the City of London. And authorities are still trying to identify the people linked to those accounts, with the Department of Homeland Security aiding the search in the U.S.
After Sony Music Entertainment learned that a cloud account belonging to Upsahl had been compromised, the thefts were first noticed and reported in June of 2021 to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The IFPI, along with the Recording Industry Association of America, was then reportedly able to identify an account on an online forum selling the unreleased music, and that account was later linked to Dalziel.
In 2022, a 23-year old hacker, Adrian Kwiatkowski from Ipswich, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing music by Ed Sheeran and Lil Uzi Vert by hacking into their cloud-based accounts and then selling the tunes on the dark web.
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Author: Saul Goode
Photo: Raph_PH