A group of popular London deejays used stolen credit cards to buy their own music on
iTunes in an elaborate scheme that netted about $650,000 in bogus royalties and sent the musicians skyrocketing up the "indie" charts, The Post has learned.
The deejays recorded 19 compilations of music they spun at nightclubs, uploaded them on iTunes through a Brooklyn-based service and then downloaded them an astonishing 65,000 times on accounts set up with the pilfered cards, law-enforcement sources said. Along with the profits, the performers nearly made a second killing -- they caught the attention of music industry executives curious about their newfound popularity.
Authorities in New York and London unmasked the group of "independent musicians" in recent months, and ring members are expected to be rounded up as early as this morning in Britain. The takedown caps an international Internet manhunt conducted by Brooklyn prosecutors inside DA Charles Hynes' office, NYPD computer crime experts and their counterparts and a London Metropolitan Police unit known as SCD-6. British authorities announced this morning that they had made nine arrests in connection with the scam.
The scam began in August with the DJs paying an annual $30-per-album fee to the Williamsburg company
Tunecore, a music distribution service, to get their albums uploaded onto iTunes. The ring then obtained thousands of stolen credit card numbers and painstakingly opened iTunes accounts with them and began downloading their albums at $10 apiece.
In December, Apple, the parent company of iTunes, began to receive stop-payment orders from various credit card companies, saying accounts were established fraudulently. A month later, Apple contacted the NYPD, which enlisted the help of the Brooklyn district attorney.
Investigators scoured the Internet for the origins of the downloads and ultimately determined they were made on London computers. They then matched the identities of IP computer-address owners and musicians. The thieves collected about $389,000 of the loot.
