A UK woman will spend 21 months in prison after admitting to illegally selling unreleased tracks from the likes of Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, Bebe Rexha and Melanie Martinez, among others.
According to City of London Police, 22-year-old Skylar Dalziel made roughly £42,000 by selling the stolen songs on the dark web. She pleaded guilty to 11 counts of making for sale an article without license of the copyright's owner, one count of transferring criminal property and three counts of acquiring/using/possessing criminal property, as per BBC.
The thefts were discovered after Sony Music Entertainment realized that singer Upsahl's cloud had been hacked, and the company reported the cyber attack back in June of 2021. Dalziel gained access to hers and similar accounts by getting into their cloud storage accounts illegally.
Dalziel was arrested on January 9, 2023, and was in possession of three drives that had 291,941 songs on them. She also kept a spreadsheet that tracked her sales, which matched bank and PayPal records.
On top of her 21 months in prison, Dalziel was also suspended for 24 months and will also have to work unpaid for 180 hours.