A dark web dealer who stole unreleased music from the likes of Coldplay, Shawn Mendes and Bebe Rexha has been given a suspended 21-month jail sentence.
Skylar Dalziel, 22, made tens of thousands of pounds after accessing the copyrighted tracks by illegally accessing cloud storage accounts linked to the artists.
Dalziel was sentenced at Luton crown court on Friday, having pleaded guilty to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences, police said. She was also ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work.
She made an estimated £42,000 between April 2021 and January 2023, City of London police said, but was caught when her Luton home was raided after a recording industry tip-off.
Her computer hard drives revealed access to about 290,000 tracks from artists including Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, Melanie Martinez, Upsahl and Bebe Rexha, police said.
Dalziel transferred money she made to bank accounts in the US, and British officers are working with the US Department of Homeland Security to identify the people linked to the accounts.
Richard Partridge, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Dalziel had complete disregard for the musicians’ creativity and hard work producing original songs and the subsequent potential loss of earnings.
“This type of activity doesn’t just impact on the artists themselves but also on employees of the record companies involved. She selfishly used their music to make money for herself by selling it on the dark web.”
The thefts came to light when Sony Music Entertainment 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, BBC News reported.
An account on an online forum selling unreleased music from various artists was identified by the IFPI and the Recording Industry Association of America. It was then linked to Dalziel.
DC Daryl Fryatt, from the police intellectual property crime unit at City of London police, said: “Stealing copyrighted material for your own financial gain is illegal. It jeopardises the work of artists and the livelihoods of the people who work with them to create and release their music.
“It’s estimated that this type of criminal activity contributes to over 80,000 job losses each year.
“Today’s sentencing sends a clear message that we have the ability and tools to locate cybercriminals and hold them to account for their actions. We believe Dalziel was working with suspects overseas and are now working to identify them.”
