Photo: Jesse Grant/Penske Media via Getty Images
On Monday, Ariana Grande filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles claiming a group of anonymous hackers gained access to her collaborators’ devices and leaked unreleased songs and footage. Per Variety, the defendants, who are listed as “John Doe,” have allegedly been breaching various phones and computers of Grande’s collaborators since 2011 and selling Grande’s data and content for “significant sums of money.” Grande accused the hackers of violating the “sacred relationship that exists between her and her fans” and is suing for invasion of privacy, violation of California computer-hacking laws, and conversion. Her lawyers stated in the suit, according to Rolling Stone, that the “malicious invasion of Ms. Grande’s privacy and disruption of her career have caused her substantial and irreparable harm due to this breach of privacy.”
The lawsuit claims hundreds of leaks have taken place since Grande began releasing music in 2011. Over the years, the hackers — whom, per People, the suit describes as “two individuals” organizing all the leaks — apparently targeted collaborators who worked closely with the singer. In 2019, they allegedly hacked into a Dropbox account belonging to a photographer who’d worked with her. The following year, the suit claims, the defendants gained access to the phone of one of Grande’s producers and stole unreleased masters, demos, and recording-session footage. Per the suit, the defendants leaked 45 unreleased songs in 2023 alone.
This is not the first case of its kind: In 2022, a 23-year-old from London was sentenced to 18 months in prison in the U.K. for hacking into cloud accounts belonging to Ed Sheeran and Lil Uzi Vert and selling their unreleased music on the dark web for crypto. The Manhattan district attorney’s office launched its own investigation into the hacker that year and was able to help identify the culprit. “Cybercrime knows no borders, and this individual executed a complex scheme to steal unreleased music in order to line his own pockets,” District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. said at the time.
“Ms. Grande initiates this action to uncover the identities of these currently unknown and unscrupulous individuals in order to hold them accountable for their invasive and reprehensible conduct,” the suit says. “Neither Ms. Grande nor any other public or private figure should have to suffer such violations caused by these wrongdoers who hide in the shadows and wreak technological havoc with impunity.”
Click Here For The Original Source.
