A cyber hacker has pleaded guilty to stealing unreleased music from artists including Coldplay, Canadian singer Shawn Mendes and American singer Bebe Rexha.
Skylar Dalziel made around £42,000 selling the clues online, according to City of London Police.
Prosecutor Richard Partridge said she “selfishly used her music to make money by selling it on the dark web.”
The 22-year-old, of Winchester Gardens in Luton, admitted 11 copyright offenses at Luton Crown Court docket and was sentenced to 21 months in prison, suspended for 24 months.
Detective Con Daryl Fryatt, of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, said: “Stealing copyrighted material for your own financial gain is illegal.
“It endangers the jobs of artists and the livelihoods of the people who work with them to create and publish their music.”
Public address mediaDalziel took over the music by illegally accessing cloud storage accounts linked to the artists.
The thefts came to light when Sony Music Leisure discovered that a cloud account owned by Upsahl had been compromised and reported it to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in June 2021.
Forty unreleased tracks had been removed and were being sold online, police said.
The IFPI and the Recording Business Affiliation of America identified an account on an online forum that sold unreleased music by various artists and that account was linked to Dalziel.
Public address media
fake imagesAgents said they arrested Dalziel on Jan. 9, 2023, and seized three drives containing 291,941 music tracks.
They also found a spreadsheet showing he had sold leads to clients and that his bank and PayPal accounts revealed he had received £42,049 from April 2021 to January 2023.
Some of this money was transferred to bank accounts in the United States and City of London police said they were working with Homeland Security Investigations to identify the people linked to the accounts.
fake imagesDalziel pleaded guilty to 11 counts of offering for sale an article without license from the copyright owner, one count of transferring legal property and three counts of acquiring/using/possessing legal property.
She was also sentenced to 180 hours of unpaid work.
Det Con Fryatt said the sentence “sends a clear message that we have the capacity and tools to track down cybercriminals and hold them to account for their actions”.
