1,263 unreleased tracks from 89 artists: the crypto song fence gets 18 months firm


Thibaut Keutchayan

November 02, 2022 at 09:05 am

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Hacker © Mikhail Nilov / Pexels

© Mikhail Nilov / Pexels

The music industry also arouses the greed of web pirates. Proof of this is the conviction of the British hacker Adrian Kwiatkowski to a prison term.

The latter managed to sell 12 unreleased tracks by artists on the Dark Web before being caught by the British police.

Three years later, the hacker is condemned by the British justice

Adrian Kwiatkowski should no longer give cold sweats to Ed Sheeran and the 88 other artists who have seen their musical productions disappear into thin air in recent years. The court in Ipswich (United Kingdom), the city where Kwiatkowski lives, has just sentenced him to 18 months in prison for no less than 20 charges (!). These include 14 charges for illegal sale of copyrighted material, three charges for unauthorized access to computer material, and three others related to his criminal activities. The hacker, also known as Spirdark, pleaded guilty in August 2022 to these charges.

To find the origin of the misdeeds of this thief, we must go back to 2019 in the United States, more precisely in the State of New York. It is not known exactly who gave the alert, the BBC evoking ” The direction dealing with musicians. Two artists who were among the victims are known to date, Ed Sheeran and Lil Uzi Vert; they are both signed to Atlantic Records.

In any case, the contents of several Cloud storage spaces have been reported as pirated, and resold on the Dark Web by a hacker under the pseudonym of Spidark. Quickly, American investigators made the link between the famous Spidark and the email address used by the latter for his crypto wallet, thus going back to Adrian Kwiatkowski.

More than 152,000 euros received in cryptocurrency

It was also the IP address linked to one of Kwiatkowski’s devices that put US investigators on his trail, leading to the investigation being transferred and his arrest by British police in Ipswich in September 2019. State, on the seven devices discovered including a hard drive, no less than 1,263 titles of 89 artists, unpublished, were in the possession of Spidark. However, he would have managed to sell only 12 titles of Lil Uzi Vert and two of Ed Sheeran against bitcoins, the equivalent of which is the tidy sum of 131,000 pounds sterling, or approximately 152,000 euros.

About the 23-year-old Briton, Detective Constable David Fryatt notably told the BBC that he has ” not only caused significant financial harm to several artists and their production companies, but it deprived them of the opportunity to release their work “. Now that the productions have returned to their owners, perhaps they will soon find themselves in stores.

Sources: BBC, Engadget



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