Wednesday, December 22, 2010

UK teen buys $750,000 of his own music from iTunes using stolen credit cards (update)

A UK teen named Lamar Johnson has recently plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud. His crime? It seems that he and his band (both in a musical sense and in a "Robin Hood" sense) used stolen credit cards to purchase something like $750,000 worth of their own music from both Amazon and the iTunes Store between January 2008 and June 2009. There's no telling how much the group would have earned from royalties, and the name of the band hasn't been disclosed (believe us, we looked), but something tells us that they probably recorded dubstep. Also, something tells us that -- since the royalties would have to be paid out to someone with a bank account -- this was a painfully easy case for prosecutors to crack. While Johnson will find his sentence tacked onto the 5-year jail term he is currently serving for grievous bodily harm, the rest of his 12 member "band" will have to wait until they appear in court in January to discover their fate.

Update: One of our fine commenters (christianoliff) dug up an article from the Sunday Mercury that discloses a little more info on the perp, including a dashing photo and the name of his MySpace artist page. Apparently his criminal enterprise was more of a 2-step thing.

UK teen buys $750,000 of his own music from iTunes using stolen credit cards (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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