UNBELIEVABLE: A hacker was spared jail time for selling unpublished Coldplay and Shawn Mendes tracks on the dark web.

 

A hacker who made £42,000 by selling unreleased music by well-known artists on the dark web has been exempted from jail time. Skylar Dalziel, 22, of Luton, was found guilty on 14 charges of trading copyrighted music without the recording artists’ or label’s permission and was given a sentence of 21 months in prison with a two-year suspension. Hard drives with up to 291,941 music tracks—including unpublished songs by Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, Melanie Martinez, Taylor Upsahl, and Bebe Rexha—were found by authorities during a raid on her house last January. Through unauthorised access to multiple cloud storage accounts connected to the musicians, she had acquired the music. Additionally, a spreadsheet that the police discovered revealed she had sold the tracks to other clients. The year before, an enquiry had been started.

 

Dalziel received payments totalling £42,049 between April 2021 and January 2023, according to a police assessment of her bank and PayPal accounts. After entering a guilty plea to nine copyright crimes and four computer misuse charges, she was given the suspended sentence at Luton Crown Court on Friday.She was also ordered to complete 180 hours unpaid work and 10 rehabilitative activity days.

 

The court ordered the forfeiture and destruction of hard drives and other equipment associated with the offending.

 

Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt, from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) 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 cyber criminals and hold them to account for their actions. We believe Dalziel was working with suspects overseas and are now working to identify them.”

 

Richard Partridge of the Crown Prosecution Service said: “Dalziel had complete disregard for the musician’s 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.”