Dark web dealer made tens of thousands selling unreleased music from Coldplay and Shawn Mendes

A dark web dealer who made tens of thousands of pounds selling stolen unreleased music from famous artists including Coldplay, Shawn Mendes and Bebe Rexha has been spared jail.

Skylar Dalziel, 22, accessed thousands of copyrighted tracks pocketing £42,000 between April 2021 to January 2023, City of London Police said.

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

Police raided her Luton home after a recording industry tip-off.

Analysis of her computer hard drives revealed she had access to 290,000 tracks from artists including Coldplay, Shawn Mendes, Melanie Martinez, Upsahl, and Bebe Rexha, the force said.

Dalziel transferred money she made to bank accounts in the US, and officers are working with Homeland Security to identify the people linked to the accounts.

On Friday, the dealer was sentenced to 21 months in jail suspended for 24 months at Luton Crown Court, having pleaded guilty to nine copyright offences and four computer misuse offences, police said.

The case was heard at Luton Crown Court (Nick Ansell/PA) PA Media

She was also ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work.

Richard Partridge of the Crown Prosecution Service said: “Dalziel had complete disregard for the musician’s creativity and hard work producing original songs and the subsequent potential loss of earnings.

“This type of activity doesn’t just impact on the artists themselves but also on employees of the record companies involved.

“She selfishly used their music to make money for herself by selling it on the dark web.”

Detective Constable Daryl Fryatt, from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit at City of London Police, 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.

“It’s estimated that this type of criminal activity contributes to over 80,000 job losses each year.

“Today’s sentencing sends a clear message that we have the ability and tools to locate cyber criminals and hold them to account for their actions.

“We believe Dalziel was working with suspects overseas and are now working to identify them.”