It can be hard being a member of Nickelback. One week you’ve got Arnold Schwarzenegger saying “congress is less popular than herpes & Nickelback” on Twitter. The next you’ve got a US army officer banning your music from being played in his command post. And that’s just February 2017 – without even considering, before that, their music being used as a punishment for drink-drivers in Canada, Australian police announcing they were “wanted for crimes against music”, or the crowdfunded scheme to get them banned from the UK.
Now trolling of the Canadian hard-rock quartet has gone criminal, with a Florida man impersonating the band’s drummer to buy $25,000 worth of musical equipment using his name and personal details.
Lee Howard Koenig, 45, was arrested by Port St Lucie police earlier this week, after pretending to be Daniel Adair to order drums and microphones from an Austrian company.
The crime came to light when the band’s team were contacted about the purchase. “I guess at this level of band … you have a lot of people that work for you,” Detective Paul Griffith told TCPalm, a Florida news website. “One of the people in his group thought it was out of the ordinary when they were getting contacted to confirm the order.”
When the band’s management asked Adair to confirm the purchase was legitimate, he had no knowledge of it. “Daniel Adair actually looked into it, as well as his security person,” Griffith said.
Adair turned amateur detective, searching on the internet for Florida-based drummers. Among them was one with three websites, who appeared to use the same drum kit setup as him. That proved to be Koenig. And when police looked into the IP address for the order, it was tracked back to Koenig’s street address. Police searched his home on Tuesday, and arrested him on two felony fraud-related charges.
TCPalm reports that Koenig, who has a prior conviction for fraud, wishes to apologise to Adair.
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