LONDON –
A pc hacker who stole unreleased songs from British pop star Ed Sheeran and American rap artist Lil Uzi Vert has been sentenced to 18 months in prison, U.Okay. prosecutors stated Friday.
Adrian Kwiatkowski, 23, of Ipswich in southern England, hacked the artists’ cloud-based accounts and bought their songs on the darkish net in trade for cryptocurrency. City of London Police, which investigated the case, stated Kwiatkowski made 131,000 kilos ($147,000) on the transactions.
“Kwiatkowski had full disregard for the musicians’ creativity and onerous work producing unique songs and the following lack of earnings,” stated Joanne Jakymec of the Crown Prosecution Service. “He selfishly stole their music to generate profits for himself.”
In August, Kwiatkowski pleaded responsible to quite a lot of fees, together with 14 copyright offenses and three counts of laptop misuse. He was sentenced Friday in Ipswich Crown Court.
City of London Police labored with authorities within the United States to examine the case after the administration firms of a number of musicians reported that a person, recognized on-line as Spirdark, had gained entry to their purchasers’ cloud-based accounts and was promoting their content material.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation in 2019, and linked the e-mail tackle used for Spirdark’s cryptocurrency account to Kwiatkowski. It then recognized the IP tackle of the machine used to hack one of many accounts as his house tackle.
After additional investigation, Kwiatkowski was arrested by the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit in September 2019.
“Cybercrime is aware of no borders, and this particular person executed a fancy scheme to steal unreleased music so as to line his personal pockets,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L Bragg Jr stated.