Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

> I also contacted Spotify and they are absolutely sure that it's not possible to create accounts without confirming e-mails and can't do anything about it.

Yeah that's not true. We discovered someone was using my son's email address for their Spotify when he tried to register for an account. There are plenty of other accounts of this happening: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Why-Does-Spotify-N...

It might be fixed now, but what you're saying was definitely true for a good few years.

Al Qaeda was founded in Pakistan in 1988.

I hope you are very aware you don't help to solve the issue in any possible way by being in this hysterical state of fear.

I don't agree with the naïve approach the Swedish government took on immigration, not much was done to actually bridge cultural and economical gaps, Swedish society has become very individualistic and losing its collectivist sense for a while, from what I gather from older generations since at least the 90s. Without a sense of community to integrate immigrants into different aspects of society, just relying on education of children (and hoping those connections between newly immigrant parents and the larger society will be enough) instead of bringing their parents into the fold to become fully citizens and aligning into shared values was never going to work out.

On the other hand, the problem stemming from this naïvety is here, right now, the solution is not to vote for SD (or AfS, and similarly populists parties) who promise to "crack down on immigration and crime" with non-solutions. The solution is not going to be simple, not going to be to just hire more police with lower standards so the government can say it's filling the ranks of Polisen to fight crime, that will only prolong, and escalate gang wars. Not that the police doesn't need more staffing, it needs, but with smart hiring, not just throwing brutes into the mix with lower standards.

It's exactly what happened when Sweden broke up gangs like Vårbynätverket, the power vacuum fueled more violence, as any country with gang issues has known for a long time. The current government is not really willing to hear about a holistic approach to solve this issue, they want to crack down on crime, and just like the narcotics policy: it won't work, it won't stamp out, gangs exist for multiple social reasons and without tackling that side of the equation there's just an infinite game of whack-a-mole, and as we see it just gets worse, now the criminals recruit 12-15 years old to do their murders for them.

I really hope you can see that there is no easy way out of this, I say that as a Brazilian living here for more than a decade: escalating violence against gangs while escalating the anti-immigration rhetoric in a country with a lot of immigrants already feeling left out of society is just going to make everything worse, I really hope Sweden doesn't go through this know failure path because it can get much uglier.

Given my experience and knowledge of how Spotify deals with much-less nefarious uses of fake streams, I'm very skeptical of these claims. There's a significant (several month) delay between a Spotify stream and the artist getting a payout. (This is probably shorter if you're Taylor Swift, but the artist profiles involved here aren't.) During this time Spotify will indeed do some checks for stream legitimacy. It's not hard to detect a song from a completely unknown artist somehow getting 1 million streams from southeast Asia.

Given that and the overall inefficiency of this scheme, my uneducated guess would be the "anonymous gang member" decided to fuck with the reporter by coming up with an outlandish, yet plausible-at-a-surface-level scheme, similar to Tony Soprano messing with his golfing buddies by telling them fake mob stories.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0D3xkOeMdA