Hacker who stole unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran, Lil Uzi Vert gets 18-month jail sentence

A computer hacker who stole unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and Lil Uzi Vert was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Friday, prosecutors in the United Kingdom said on Friday.

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British resident Adrian Kwiatkowski, 23, of Ipswich, pleaded guilty in August to charges that included 14 copyright offenses and three counts of computer misuse, according to The Associated Press.

Kwiatkowski also pleaded guilty to one charge of converting criminal property and two charges of possession of criminal property, SkyNews reported.

The 23-year-old admitted receiving Bitcoin cryptocurrency for the songs https://t.co/hogqMZ8YNb
— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 21, 2022

He was sentenced in Ipswich Crown Court.

Kwiatkowski was accused of hacking the cloud-based accounts of British pop star Sheeran and American rap star Vert, the BBC reported. Prosecutors said Kwiatkowski sold two of Sheeran’s songs and 12 of Vert’s on the dark web in exchange for cryptocurrency, according to the news outlet.

City of London police said that Kwiatkowski collected $147,000 for selling the unreleased songs, the BBC reported.

Chief crown prosecutor Joanne Jakymec said Kwiatkowski had “complete disregard” for the musicians’ creativity and lost earnings, the news outlet reported.

“He selfishly stole their music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web,” Jakymec said in a statement. “We will be pursuing ill-gotten gains from these proceeds of crime.”

An investigation was initially launched by U.S. authorities in 2019 after musicians and their managers reported to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office that an online person known as “Spirdark” had hacked multiple cloud-based accounts and were selling their content, the AP reported.

Authorities linked the email address used for Spirdark’s cryptocurrency account to Kwiatkowski, according to the news outlet. It then identified the IP address of the device used to hack one of the accounts as his home address.

Kwiatkowski was arrested by the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit in September 2019. His laptop was searched and 565 audio files from dozens of artists were found, including unreleased songs from Sheeran and Vert, SkyNews reported.

“Cybercrime knows no borders, and this individual executed a complex scheme to steal unreleased music in order to line his own pockets,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. said in a statement.

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