A cyber hacker has pleaded guilty to stealing unreleased music from artists including Coldplay, Canadian singer Shawn Mendes and US singer Bebe Rexha.

Skylar Dalziel made about £42,000 by selling the tracks online, according to City of London Police.

Prosecutor Richard Partridge said she “selfishly used their music to make money for herself by selling it on the dark web”.

The 22-year-old, of Winchester Gardens in Luton, admitted 11 copyright offences at Luton Crown Court and was sentenced to 21 months imprisonment, suspended for 24 months.

Det Con Daryl Fryatt, from the force’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, said: “Stealing copyrighted material for your own financial gain is illegal.

“It jeopardises the work of artists and the livelihoods of the people who work with them to create and release their music.”

Dalziel got hold of the music by illegally accessing cloud storage accounts linked to the artists.

The thefts came to light when Sony Music Entertainment discovered a cloud account owned by Upsahl had been compromised and reported it to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in June 2021.

Forty unreleased tracks had been extracted and were being sold online, police said.

The IFPI and the Recording Industry Association of America identified an account on an online forum selling unreleased music from various artists and that account was linked to Dalziel.

Officers said they arrested Dalziel on 9 January 2023 and seized three drives which contained 291,941 music tracks.

They also found a spreadsheet which showed she had sold tracks to customers and her PayPal and bank accounts revealed she had received £42,049 from April 2021 to January 2023.

Some of this money was transferred to bank accounts in the US and City of London Police said it was working with Homeland Security Investigations to identify the people linked to the accounts.

Dalziel pleaded guilty to 11 counts of making for sale an article without licence of the copyright’s owner, one count of transferring criminal property and three counts of acquiring/using/possessing criminal property.

She was also sentenced to 180 hours of unpaid work.

Det Con Fryatt said the sentencing “sends a clear message that we have the ability and tools to locate cyber criminals and hold them to account for their actions”.

(BBC News)