A Hacker Sentenced For Stealing And Selling Unreleased Coldplay Songs

Coldplay (Instagram @annaleemedia)

JAKARTA - The British High Court has found guilty of a cyber hacker named Skylar Dalziel for stealing unreleased music from a number of artists, such as Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, and Bebe Rexha.

Dalziel is said to have earned 42 thousand pounds (around Rp. 845 million) after selling the music online on illegal websites.

"He selfishly uses their music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web," Prosecutor Richard totaled, citing the BBC, Monday, January 6.

The 22-year-old hacker fromten Gardens, Luton also admitted eleven copyright infringements at the Luton High Court, and was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Apart from being sentenced to confinement, Dalziel was also sentenced to 180 hours of work without being paid.

Detective Total Fryatt of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit said, "Stealing copyrighted material for your own financial gain is an illegal act."

"This endangers the work of artists and livelihoods of people who work with them to create and release their music."

Meanwhile, the theft was revealed when Sony Music Entertainment discovered that Upsahl's cloud account had been compromised and reported it to the International Federation of Fonographic Industry (IFPI) in June 2021.

It was stated that Dalziel obtained the music by accessing a cloud storage account connected to artists illegally. The forty unreleased songs have been extracted and sold online.

IFPI and the American Recording Industry Association identified an account on an online forum selling unreleased music from various artists and accounts linked to Dalziel.

Dalziel was arrested on January 9, 2023, by confiscating three drives containing 291,941 songs. In addition, a work sheet was also found showing that he had sold songs to customers and PayPal accounts and his bank revealed that he had received more than 42 thousand pounds from April 2021 to January 2023.

Some of this money was transferred to a bank account in the US, and the London City Police said they were working with the Homeland Security Investigation to identify people associated with the account.