Adrian Kwiatkowski, the 22-year-old who sold unreleased tracks from 89 artists after hacking into cloud-based accounts, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Kwiatkowski had hacked artists online databases and cloud accounts and sold their unreleased and unfinished material for cryptocurrency, making £131,000 from the scheme.
Looking into the years long police investigation, City of London police and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said it started in 2019 after management companies of several musicians reported their clients’ cloud accounts had been compromised. Soon after, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office traced the songs that were for sale to an individual operating as ‘Spirdark’ online.
After the connection had been made, officers arrested Kwaitkowski and retrieved seven devices, one of which was a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists. Furthermore, City of London police also said that the hard drive contained a document that summarised the method he had used to obtain the songs.
He will now remain behind bars for 18 months.
