Hacker Sentenced For Stealing Coldplay's Music

A  British hacker named Skylar Dalziel has pleaded guilty to stealing unreleased music from a number of artists including Coldplay, US singer Bebe Rexha and Canadian singer Shawn Mendes. Dalziel got the music by hacking into cloud storage accounts linked to the artists. 

According to  the City of London Police, the hacker  around £42,000 by selling the tracks on the Dark Web. The 22-year-old, from Luton, admitted 11 copyright offences at Luton Crown Court and was sentenced to 21 months imprisonment, suspended for 24 months.

 The thefts came to light when Sony Music Entertainment discovered a cloud account owned by singer-songwriter Upsahl had been compromised and reported it to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in June 2021. Forty unreleased tracks had been extracted and were being sold online according to the police.

The IFPI and the Recording Industry Association of America identified an account on an online forum selling unreleased music from various artists and that account was linked to Dalziel. Police said they arrested Dalziel and seized three drives which contained 291,941 music tracks. They also found a spreadsheet which showed she had sold tracks to customers and her PayPal and bank accounts revealed she had received £42,049 from April 2021 to January 2023.

Some of this money was transferred to bank accounts in the US and City of London Police said it was working with US Dept. of Homeland Security to identify the people linked to the accounts.  According to authorities, some of this money was transferred to bank accounts in the United States and the City of London.

Image: @Coldplay

BBC     |     ITV     |     NME     |     Rolling Stone     |     Yahoo     |     Independent

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