TECH: Hacker sentenced to jail for stealing Ed Sheeran songs and selling them for cryptocurrency

British Ipswich hack­er Adri­an Kwiatkows­ki has been sen­tenced to 18 months in prison for steal­ing two unre­leased Ed Sheer­an songs, accord­ing to the BBC.

Kwiatkows­ki sold Sheer­an’s song, along with 12 oth­er songs by US rap­per Lil Uzi Vert, on the dark web for £131,000 (approx­i­mate­ly $148,000) worth of cryptocurrency.

British pros­e­cu­tors say Kwiatkows­ki obtained unre­leased music by hack­ing into their cloud accounts.

It was not spec­i­fied which cloud ser­vice, but offi­cials said they found 1,263 unre­leased songs, which they pla­gia­rized from many more artists.

In 2019, the U.S. author­i­ties start­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion after sev­er­al musi­cians report­ed to the New York Dis­trict Attor­ney’s Office that “a per­son using the name of Spir­dark hacked their accounts and sold con­tent online.” .

Inves­ti­ga­tors even­tu­al­ly linked Kwiatkows­ki with the email address Spir­dark used for cryp­tocur­ren­cy accounts involved in the incident.

Addi­tion­al­ly, his UK address was linked to an IP address found asso­ci­at­ed with one of the hacked devices.

When he was arrest­ed, Lon­don police found sev­en devices con­tain­ing 1,263 unre­leased songs by 89 artists.

Author­i­ties found more evi­dence files on his hard dri­ve, includ­ing doc­u­ments detail­ing the meth­ods used to hack the vic­tim’s account.

Also found was bit­coin, which he admits to hav­ing received in exchange for the song.

He plead­ed guilty to a total of 19 charges, includ­ing copy­right infringe­ment and pos­ses­sion of crim­i­nal prop­er­ty, which allowed him to serve a year and a half in prison.