Strange worked at Eminem’s studio in Ferndale, Michigan, from about 2007 until 2021, when he was reportedly dismissed. Part of his job was running the computer system where Eminem (whose real name is Marshall Mathers) kept the songs he was still working on. According to court documents, he copied at least 10 of those recordings without permission, then sold them online in July and August of 2024 without Eminem’s knowledge.
The tipster fan, based in the U.K., passed along chat screenshots that led agents to one of the buyers, and the buyer named Strange. When Strange worked at the studio, he was one of only four people there who could get to the drives where the songs were kept.
After the songs landed on streaming services, they were accessed more than 8 million times by November 2025, according to platform data prosecutors cited. The government put a value of at least $750,000 on the infringement, and some of the tracks had already been mastered in the studio.
Insider fraud shows up at businesses of every size. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, an Austin, Texas-based group that trains and certifies fraud investigators, puts occupational fraud’s toll at about 5% of an organization’s yearly revenue. Asset misappropriation, in which an employee steals or misuses a company’s resources, is the most common form of fraud, according to the report, representing 90% of cases they studied.
How a fan’s screenshots helped the FBI find Eminem’s former engineer
The trouble started in January 2025, when more than 25 unreleased Eminem tracks began popping up online. Most were demos and works in progress recorded between 1999 and 2018. Studio staff came across a picture of a song list someone was trying to sell, and it matched a list stored on one of the studio’s own hard drives. The complaint says those drives needed a password, had no internet connection and sat in a safe whenever nobody was using them.
The staff contacted the FBI on Jan. 16, 2025. Eminem also reached out to Fred “Fredwreck” Nasser, a producer he’s worked with for years, and Nasser posted a social media warning to the leaker, saying they’d be tracked down.
That’s when a fan in the U.K. got in touch with Nasser and passed along chats he’d had with someone online who called himself Doja Rat. According to the complaint, Doja Rat turned out to be a 31-year-old man in Ontario, Canada. He told agents he’d chipped in with other Eminem fans to pay Strange roughly $50,000 in bitcoin.
Strange went by “Dope Edit” online, Doja Rat said, and told him he had more than 300 Eminem songs. Other buyers pointed to Strange, too. None were charged as part of the investigation.
When the FBI went through Strange’s house on Jan. 28, 2025, agents turned up Eminem’s handwritten lyrics in a safe and a VHS tape holding an unreleased music video. They also took hard drives, and one of them held about 12,000 audio files that included music by other artists.
Back in March 2025, when Strange was first charged, Eminem’s longtime spokesperson Dennis Dennehy said the harm to the rapper’s legacy from someone on the inside “cannot be overstated.” This time, Eminem’s camp didn’t comment when Variety asked about the plea.
