Scotland Yard and the FBI have smashed a fake music gang who allegedly conned iTunes and Amazon out of more than half a million pounds.
A group of DJs from London and the Midlands were arrested and their homes raided on Wednesday over a suspected music royalties scam which is the first of its kind dealt with by Metropolitan police detectives.
It is alleged that the gang placed their own music on iTunes, the Apple music store, and Amazon, and used stolen credit card details to buy it.
It is claimed they generated about £450,000 in download sales - even catching the eye of music industry chiefs as a new emerging talent.
The group used the fake sales to boost their ratings on the charts after recording 19 music compilations. They then claimed nearly £200,000 in royalties, it is alleged.
Ten people aged 19 to 41 were arrested in raids in London, Birmingham, Kent and Wolverhampton by detectives from Scotland Yard's new E-crime unit, working in partnership with the FBI in the US.
They are being questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering.
The alleged scam began last August with the DJs paying an annual $30-per-album fee to the company Tunecore, a music distribution service, to get their albums uploaded on to iTunes.
The DJs then obtained thousands of stolen credit card numbers and opened iTunes accounts with them and began downloading their albums at $10 a time.
DCI Terry Wilson, from the Met's Police Central e-Crime Unit, said: "This has been a complex investigation to establish what we believe to be an international conspiracy to defraud Apple and Amazon."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment