A hacker has been convicted of stealing previously unreleased music tracks from artists including British singer Ed Sheeran and rapper Lil Uzi Vert. as reported skynewsAdrian Kwiatkowski managed to illegally access the online cloud accounts of many famous artists (Frank Ocean, Post Malone, Kanye West…)
The 23-year-old would then electronically copy unreleased songs not yet released by artists, such as give me that Y Butterfly by Ed Sheeran Their goal: to sell them online for cryptocurrencies, mainly Bitcoins.
150,000 euros in damages
But the young hacker’s plans did not last long. Frank Ocean’s collaborators quickly discovered that the American singer’s Dropbox account had been hacked and its contents put up for sale by a netizen using the pseudonym “Spirdark”.
Alerted, the New York District Attorney discovered that the email address used by Spirdark to set up his cryptocurrency account and hack the various stars was linked to that of Adrian Kwiatkowski, as well as his home IP address in Ipswich, United Kingdom.
Thanks to these stolen music, the young man had managed to pocket 131,000 pounds (about 150,000 euros) since 2019. According to the City of London police, quoted by bbc newsAdrian Kwiatkowski had 1,263 pirated audio files from 89 artists, stored on seven devices, including a hard drive.
Adrian Kwiatkowski, who admitted to 19 charges including copyright infringement and criminal possession of property, was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison.
Source: BFM TV
