Dark web hacker who stole unreleased Ed Sheeran songs must pay back £100,000
A convicted computer hacker who stole unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and offered to sell them on the dark web has been ordered to pay back over £100,000.
Adrian Kwiatkowski, 23, of Hampton Road in Ipswich, was jailed in October last year after illegally obtaining two songs from the Suffolk-based hitmaker and 12 from American rapper Lil Uzi Vert after hacking into the performers' digital accounts.
He then put them forward for sale in exchange for cryptocurrency.
Kwiatkowski pleaded guilty to three charges of unauthorised access to computer material, 14 charges of making for sale an article infringing copyright, one charge of converting criminal property and two charges of possession of criminal property before being jailed for 18 months at Ipswich Crown Court.
The hacker has now been ordered to pay £101,053 within three months after a court granted a confiscation order brought by the Police Intellectual Crime Unit (PIPCU) at City of London Police on 26 May.
It is made up of £51,975 held in a bank account owned by Kwiatkowski and 2.64 Bitcoin, worth £49,528, which makes it the first confiscation order of cryptocurrency secured by PIPCU.
Det Con Daryl Fryatt from the PIPCU said: "Kwiatkowski executed a complex scheme to sell creative content that he did not own.
"Not only did he cause several musicians and their production companies significant financial harm, he deprived them of the ability to release their own work.
"Our work doesn’t just stop at conviction, and this result means that Kwiatkowski will not be able to benefit any further from the money he earned through criminal activity."
City of London Police said the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation in 2019 after the management companies of several musicians reported that an individual, known online as Spirdark, had gained access to several accounts and was selling the content saved in them.
The investigation linked the email address used to set up Spirdark’s cryptocurrency account to Kwiatkowski and identified the IP address of the device used to hack one of the accounts as his home address, according to City of London Police.
Kwiatkowski was arrested by PIPCU officers in September 2019 and the unit seized seven devices including a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists.
Some 565 audio files, including songs by Sheeran and Vert, were discovered on the Apple Mac owned by the 23-year-old criminal hacker.
Kwiatkowski faces a further 18 months in prison, on top of his current jail sentence, if the £101,053 is not paid back in three months.
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