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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#111

Post by dannyobrien »

user_named wrote: post #105
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.

do you have a link or source for this story? (not sceptical, just curious)

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#112

Post by winternett »

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 think I came across a YouTube video a while back that said even the platform was sponsoring fake artist accounts to recoup/claim streaming royalty payments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCAPll9A5F8

After years of grinding to break ground on spotify and seeing the names they promote taking the lion share of revenue it becomes very apparent that it's a cash grab that just can't be trusted. There are literally dozens of other sites that do the exact same schemes and only pay out a fraction of the revenue they rake in for doing little to nothing for artist and music discovery.

The social Internet just seems more scammy than ever, and that's why I keep most of my music work offline until it gets worked into a project. Eventually there will be a correction hopefully, but the vast amount of free/unrewarded work that is being hustled out of people from these sites is not sustainable, and eventually it will turn into a content creator drought/strike if it goes unchecked too long.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#113

Post by netsharc »

jan_pike wrote: post #83
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...Makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it. I guess it wasn't really apparent to me before it came to my attention like this, but making online content and artificially boosting it, so you can blend your funds within what you've obtained from ad revenue is so simple, yet so brilliant. Makes you wonder what other media out there might be laundering schemes, too...

There is a shitton of crap movies in Hollywood. I wonder...

Of course Hollywood accounting is already "This movie took $100 million at the box office, we spent $98 million on 'marketing', using our own internal marketing company.".

I guess making crap Hollywood movies loses you money rather than laundering it...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#114

Post by netsharc »

macNchz wrote: post #18
tigerBL00D wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to the playlist and it's definitely the same song over and over again with slight tweaks. Imagine finding dozens of blogs where posts are all the same, but with very slight changes to vocabulary used in each blog.

There has actually been a lot of that showing up in my google search results for the past few years… there are thousands of sites out there that were created by scraping news articles and blog posts and replacing random words with thesaurus alternatives. The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory. I’ve actually…

YouTube is also full of this, with bots narrating the story using text-to-speech, some of them sound passable as humans...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#115

Post by ggm »

seibelj wrote: post #110
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.

yes. but the cost side matters: if a criminal has $1,000,000 but can only recover $1,000 "safely" burning $999,000 then a method which returns $500,000 for burn of $500,000 is better, if riskier. "it depends"

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#116

Post by objclxt »

netsharc wrote: post #113
jan_pike wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That...Makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it. I guess it wasn't really apparent to me before it came to my attention like this, but making online content and artificially boosting it, so you can blend your funds within what you've obtained from ad revenue is so simple, yet so brilliant. Makes you wonder what other media out there might be laundering schemes, too...

There is a shitton of crap movies in Hollywood. I wonder... Of course Hollywood accounting is already "This movie took $100 million at the box office, we spent $98 million on 'marketing', using our own internal marketing company.". I guess making crap Hollywood movies loses you money rather than laundering it...

> There is a shitton of crap movies in Hollywood. I wonder...

The movie doesn't need to be crap to be a product of money laundering! The Wolf of Wall Street[1] was infamously funded by money laundering (from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund),

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_of_Wall_Street_(2013_...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#119

Post by seibelj »

ggm wrote: post #115
seibelj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes. but the cost side matters: if a criminal has $1,000,000 but can only recover $1,000 "safely" burning $999,000 then a method which returns $500,000 for burn of $500,000 is better, if riskier. "it depends"

I worked in an office next to an Uber clone that was clearly unsuccessful. Yet they had a significant Series A from a Russian oligarch, then got bought a few years later at something like 10x the Series A funding amount by a different Russian oligarch. There was a press release and a news story about how wonderful this was.

This scheme was so clearly a laundering play, but everyone pretended it was some amazing exit. I'm confident the tech industry is full of these shenanigans, but I've never seen anything like this uncovered.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#120

Post by afiori »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #97
thayne wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what the parent described?

No, they suggested using stolen bank accounts to receive the artist royalties.

I think they meant "stolen identities and legitimate bank account opened by the stolen identity"
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