Dark web dealer who stole unreleased music from Coldplay spared jail
Share:
Skylar Dalziel, 22, who made an estimated £42,000 after illegally accessing tracks, given suspended prison sentence. A dark web dealer who stole unreleased music from the likes of Coldplay, Shawn Mendes and Bebe Rexha has been given a suspended 21-month jail sentence.
Skylar Dalziel, 22, made tens of thousands of pounds after accessing the copyrighted tracks by illegally accessing cloud storage accounts linked to the artists. Dalziel was sentenced at Luton crown court on Friday, having pleaded guilty to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences, police said. She was also ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work.
She made an estimated £42,000 between April 2021 and January 2023, City of London police said, but was caught when her Luton home was raided after a recording industry tip-off. Her computer hard drives revealed access to about 290,000 tracks from artists including Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, Melanie Martinez, Upsahl and Bebe Rexha, police said.
Dalziel transferred money she made to bank accounts in the US, and British officers are working with the US Department of Homeland Security to identify the people linked to the accounts. Richard Partridge, 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.
