A 22-year-old who pleaded guilty to stealing and selling unreleased music by artists like Coldplay and Shawn Mendes was sentenced to 21 months in prison, the BBC reports.
Skylar Dalziel was accused of hacking cloud storage accounts linked to various artists and then selling the stolen tracks on the dark web. Dalziel allegedly made an estimated £42,000 (about $52,000) from the scheme between April 2021 and Jan. 2023, according to police.
Dalziel was charged with, and later pleaded guilty to, 11 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.
When police finally caught up with Dalziel in 2023, they said her hard drives contained about 290,000 tracks. Other artists affected included Melanie Martinez, Upsahl, and Bebe Rexha.
Authorities also found a spreadsheet detailing the track transactions, as well as PayPal and bank account statements showing how much Dalziel had made. According to authorities, some of this money was transferred to bank accounts in the United States and the City of London. (Authorities are reportedly still trying to identify the people linked to those accounts, with the Department of Homeland Security aiding the search in the U.S.)
The thefts were first noticed and reported to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in June 2021 after Sony Music Entertainment learned that a cloud account belonging to Upsahl had been compromised. 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.
The IFPI and the RIAA did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s requests for comment.
Just a few years ago, another hacker in the U.K. was sent to prison for a similar crime. In 2022, Adrian Kwiatkowski, a 23-year-old 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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