The man got into the artists’ personal accounts and managed to access two songs by Sheeran and twelve songs by Lil Uzi Vert, which he then resold on the shady parts of the internet commonly known as the “dark web”. He was paid in the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
According to the public prosecutor’s office CPS, the man earned 131,000 pounds, equivalent to 1.7 million kroner, from the sale of the songs.
The matter was first investigated in the United States in 2019, when a publisher reported to the police that a hacker with the alias “Spirdark” had accessed unreleased music by other artists and resold it.
When it turned out that someone in the UK was behind the crime, the investigation ended up on the table of the British authorities. Investigators then found 565 audio files on the man’s computer, CPS writes in a press release.