Hacker Who Stole Unreleased Recordings from Musicians Gets a Year and a Half in Prison

Daniel ZimmermannOctober 25, 2022

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British authorities reported that 22-year-old hacker Adrian Kwiatkowski, who stole recordings from musicians, was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

The hacker stole unreleased recordings of world-famous musicians, and then sold the stolen tracks on the dark web for cryptocurrency.

Let me remind you that Kwiatkowski was detained back in 2019. Then a special unit of the British police dealing with crimes in the field of copyright and intellectual property reported that in order to steal rare tracks, he hacked cloud accounts of his victims on various sites.

The investigation that led to the hacker’s arrest was launched by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office after several complaints from companies representing the affected artists. When it became clear that the suspect was in the UK, information about him was passed on to local law enforcement officers, who conducted searches and carried out an arrest.

Previously, law enforcement agencies did not disclose which particular winners of numerous music awards suffered from the actions of a teenager (at the time of his arrest, Adrian Kwiatkowski was 19 years old). Now it is reported that the hacker was trying to sell two unreleased songs by British pop singer Ed Sheeran and 12 more unreleased songs by American rapper Lil Uzi Werth for cryptocurrency. A total of 565 stolen audio files were found during a search on the criminal’s laptop, including tracks by Werth and Sheeran.

After his arrest, Kwiatkowski pleaded guilty to a number of charges, including unauthorized access to computer materials, the manufacture and sale of infringing items, and the conversion and possession of criminally obtained property. He also admitted that he received cryptocurrency in bitcoins for the sale of stolen tracks.

Last week, the Royal Court of the British city of Ipswich sentenced the hacker to 18 months in prison.

Kwiatkowski completely disregarded the creativity of the musicians, their hard work in creating original songs and the subsequent loss of earnings. He selfishly stole their music to make money by selling it on the dark web.British police said.

It was hoped that these events would shed light on the most notorious incident of the theft of unreleased music in the summer of 2019. Then an unknown attacker stole from Radiohead bandleader Thom Yorke 18 hours of unreleased recordings made while working on the OK Computer album, released in 1997, and stored on archival minidiscs.

For these recordings, not intended for the public, the extortionists demanded a $150,000 ransom, otherwise they threatened to release them to the public. But instead of negotiating with attackers or ignoring the problem, Radiohead decided to do otherwise. As a result, the musicians themselves published all 18 hours of unreleased material online for free.

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