A dark web dealer who made tens of thousands of pounds selling stolen unreleased music from famous artists including Coldplay, Shawn Mendes and Bebe Rexha has been spared jail.
Skylar Dalziel, 22, accessed thousands of copyrighted tracks pocketing £42,000 between April 2021 to January 2023, City of London Police said.
She got hold of the music by illegally accessing cloud storage accounts linked to the artists in question, the force said.
Police raided her Luton home after a recording industry tip-off and analysis of her computer hard drives 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 officers are working with Homeland Security to identify the people linked to the accounts.
On Friday, the dark web dealer was sentenced to 21 months in jail at Luton Crown Court, suspended for 24 months, having pleaded guilty to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences, and 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.’
The IFPI were able to link the account to Dalziel and referred the case to the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at City of London Police June 2022.
A total of 40 unreleased tracks had been extracted from the account and were being sold online.
The IFPI and the Recording Industry Association of America identified that an account on an online forum was being used to sell unreleased music from artists represented by Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, including Upsahl, Coldplay and Melanie Martinez.
The IFPI were able to link the account to Dalziel and referred the case to the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at City of London Police in June 2022.
After further investigation, officers from PIPCU arrested Dalziel on 9 January 2023 and a search warrant was executed at her home address.
Officers seized three solid-state drives that contained a total of 291,941 music tracks. A spreadsheet, which showed that Dalziel had sold tracks to a number of customers, was also found.
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.’
