A Hacker Steals Ed-Sheeran Songs for Crypto and Goes to Jail

A hacker who stole Ed-Sheeran songs for crypto and sold them gets prison for 18 months 

Adrian Kwiatkowski, a hacker from Ipswich in England who has stolen two unreleased Ed-Sheeran songs for crypto, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison, as per the BBC. The hacker steals Ed-Sheeran songs for crypto and has sold out, along with 12 other songs by American rapper Lil Uzi Vert, for cryptocurrency worth US$148,000 on the dark web. 

UK prosecutors stated Kwiatkowski got a chance to put his hands on the unreleased tracks by hacking into their cloud-based accounts. But yet they did not specify which cloud services those were, but he managed to steal from a lot more artists and it is because authorities found 1,263 unreleased songs in his possession. American authorities initiated an investigation back in 2019 after several musicians raised complaints to the New York District Attorney's office that someone with the name Spirdark had hacked their accounts and was trading their content online. Investigators eventually linked Kwiatkowski to the email address Spirdark used with the cryptocurrency account involved in the case. Later, his UK address was linked to an IP address that was found about one of the hacked devices. 

After getting arrested for selling Ed-Sheeran songs for crypto, London police got seven devices that contained more than 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 different artists. Authorities got more incriminating files on his hard drive, including a document where he detailed the method of hacking into the victims' accounts. They also found his Bitcoins, which he admitted to receiving in return for the songs. After all this, he pled guilty to 19 charges that included copyright infringement and possessing criminal property, enough to put him away for a year and a half.