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A hacker from Luton who stole and sold unreleased music from artists, including Coldplay, has been sentenced.
Skylar Taylor Dalziel, 22, and of Winchester Gardens, Luton, got hold of the music by illegally accessing cloud storage accounts linked to the band, Upsahl and Melanie Martinez.
An investigation by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at City of London Police revealed that Dalziel had made around £42,000 by selling the tracks.
The case started in June 2021 when Sony Music Entertainment reported to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry that a cloud account owned by US artist Upsahl had been compromised – with 40 unreleased tracks taken and 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. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry linked the account to Dalziel and referred the case to City of London Police in June 2022.
Officers from PIPCU arrested Dalziel in January last year and searched her home. They took three solid-state drives that contained 291,941 music tracks, and a spreadsheet showing that Dalziel had sold tracks to a number of customers.
During her police interview, Dalziel answered “no comment” to all questions asked.
Her Dalziel’s PayPal account and bank account showed that she had received payments worth a total of £42,049 from April 2021 to January 2023.
She transferred some of this money to a number of bank accounts in the US. Officers from PIPCU are currently working with Homeland Security Investigations to identify the people linked to the accounts.
Dalziel pleaded guilty in October 2024 at Luton Crown Court to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences. She was sentenced at the same court on today (January 3) to 21 months imprisonment, suspended for 24 months, and must also complete 180 hours of unpaid work.
Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt, from the PIPCU, 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.
“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, Specialist Prosecutor of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Dalziel had complete disregard for the musicians’ 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.”
