Dark web hacker who pocketed £42k selling unreleased tracks by Coldplay and Shawn Mendes avoids jail
3 January 2025, 16:31
A woman who raked in over £42,000 selling unreleased music by big name artists on the dark web has been handed a suspended sentence.
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Skylar Dalziel, 22, from Luton, was sentenced to 21 months imprisonment, suspended for 24 months, for buying and selling copyrighted music without the consent of the recording artists or their record labels.
Ms Dalziel pocketed an estimated £42,000 from selling the “hacked” copyrighted music between April 2021 to January 2023, police said.
Ms Dalziel got hold of the music by illegally accessing the artists’ cloud storage accounts, an investigation found.
She had also purchased at least six unreleased, non-purchasable tracks on the dark web using bitcoin, evidence provided by The Recording Industry Association of America revealed.
Officers discovered several hard drives revealing she had access to thousands of unreleased tracks in a raid of her Luton home.
Almost 300,000 unreleased songs by the likes of Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, Melanie Matinez, Taylor Upsahl, and Bebe Rexha were discovered on the hard drives.
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She pleaded guilty to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences, police said.
The dark web dealer was found guilty of 14 counts of making for sale an article without licence of the copyright owner during a sentencing hearing at Luton Crown Court.
She was also ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work alongside the suspended sentence.
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 (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.”
This is not the first time hackers have got hold of unreleased music.
In 2019, several musicians reported that an individual, known online as Spirdark, had gained access to a series of cloud-based accounts and was selling the content that had been saved in them.
A police unit seized seven devices including a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists, as well as a document summarising the method he had used to obtain them.
The suspect, Adrian Kwiatkowski from Ipswich, admitted he had hacked the musicians’ accounts and sold their songs online in exchange for cryptocurrency.
Police seized £51,975 of his assets that were held in his bank account and 2.64 BTC (Bitcoin), which was worth £49,528 at the time.
In 2022 he was ordered to pay £101,503 within three months following proceedings brought by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at City of London Police.
