Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An odd discovery on Spotify

robinsloan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 442 posts

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#101

Post by throwaway290 »

usednet wrote: post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

See also Twitch streamers, Amazon listings with weird pricing, etc. Give someone poor dirty cash, let them set up accounts and buy/subscribe. You lose a percentage but you get clean money.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#102

Post by vintermann »

hedora wrote: post #66
usednet wrote: post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

Interestingly, searching for Danni Richardson on Tidal yields the following apparently real artists: Deanie Richardson Danny Richardson Dani Richardson So, they are typo-squatting as part of the scheme. I asssume money laundering would work by setting up Spotify accounts with stolen money (that they used to buy gift cards?), then streaming the fake songs. Does spotify pay artists differently for paid vs free accounts…

Don't assume they're just targeting Spotify. Spotify is (or used to be) the best at catching algorithmic spam, the other streaming services hardly care at all.

Likely they use a front service such as TuneCore which gives them access to all the streaming services. Just using Spotify is unnecessary risky if the goal is simply money laundering.

(However, if the goal is to do pick up some royalties from all those background plays, and I think that's more common, then Spotify is clearly better)

For an example of spam/fraud, look up the album "Angry man" on Deezer. Or rather, the albums. There are 200+ of them, all with the same stock image album art. That spammer is easily recognizable, he's been doing a similar bulk upload several times per month for maybe 10 years now. He's an example of a spammer who is present on very many streaming services. Spotify has kicked him off, though.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#103

Post by colechristensen »

usednet wrote: post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

I had my Spotify password compromised a while back and random fake generated music would play sometimes from my stereo. Very strange experience until I figured out what happened.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#105

Post by user_named »

usednet wrote: post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

The criminal gångs in Sweden are using Spotify to launder drug money buy buying streams on artists in their circle who they also to some extent control. One of those were just murdered last year.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#106

Post by vintermann »

RyanShook wrote: post #11

Haven’t published on Spotify before but isn’t it time consuming to create new artist profiles?

You don't publish on Spotify. You publish on one of the services which have a distribution deal with Spotify, like TuneCore or CDBaby. Some of the dodgier services like that have features to make this exact sort of thing easy (for instance, you get to choose a new publisher label name every time).

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#107

Post by caf »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #57
usednet wrote: post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

That almost makes sense, except that the money is paid out to the artist, so if you're using a stolen bank account, it remains 'dirty' after the round-trip. What you'd want to do is use the dirty money for the bots that drive up the revenue, and the clean account for the artist to collect the royalties. This way the artist has plausible deniability, and if the bank account paying for the bots gets busted, it doesn't…

This is right - the whole point with money laundering is to have a legitimate business where extra money can come in, apparently from real but untraceable customers, that is really dirty money you control.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#108

Post by ggm »

What "cost" to the money launderer? What is the "cost" like, compared to e.g. mules taking cash to casinos, or laboriously processing e-card visa style money?

ie how "effective" is this, compared to alternatives? I had a belief the rate of IPR payment was low, so this is probably a low rate of return, high cost, fully digital method.

Which in my theory, would also be making spotify significant profit, as the facilitator. Are they now at some legal risk if they can "detect" this traffic?

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#109

Post by michaericalribo »

remuskaos wrote: post #82

Ooh, I think I found something like that too , a few years ago. I searched for a song (a real one, that I already knew) called "Dyson Sphere". That search still yields a few hits. One of those was by an artist called Adal, and while it wasn't what I was looking for at all, I still listened to it. It was slow, rythmic and very simple music (think "human music"). When I looked for other works of this Adal, they had may…

Your memories of Adal seem unreliable Are you sure you are remembering correctly is it possible it was a different name There Is No Musician Named Adal I’m sorry your query “Adal” did not return any hits The name Adal is invalid please re-enter a real musician You have misremembered aAdDal is nothing Invalid Entry: Confirmed: No Entity ADAL In Human History.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#110

Post by seibelj »

ggm wrote: post #108

What "cost" to the money launderer? What is the "cost" like, compared to e.g. mules taking cash to casinos, or laboriously processing e-card visa style money? ie how "effective" is this, compared to alternatives? I had a belief the rate of IPR payment was low, so this is probably a low rate of return, high cost, fully digital method. Which in my theory, would also be making spotify significant profit, as the facilita…

Every single business can be a vector for money laundering. From cash laundromats to high end technology, if the launderer owns the business then it has potential. I would estimate the government catches somewhere in the ballpark of 0.00000001% of all laundering. Businesses also have zero incentive to stop this activity as long as they get their margin.
Post reply on HN