A dark web dealer who pocketed thousands selling stolen unreleased music from famous artists including Coldplay, Shawn Mendes and Bebe Rexha has been spared jail.
Skylar Dalziel, 22, got hold of the music by raiding cloud storage accounts linked to the musicians and made £42,000 flogging the tunes between April 2021 and January 2023.
Analysis of her computer hard drives following her arrest revealed she had access to 290,000 tracks from artists including Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, Melanie Martinez, Upsahl, and Bebe Rexha
Dalziel transferred money she made to bank accounts in the US, and British police are working with Homeland Security to identify the people linked to the accounts.
She pleaded guilty to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences at Luton Crown Court and was handed a 21-month jail sentence which was suspended for two years.
She was also ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work.
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.’
Detective Constable 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 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.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
