Live data from Hacker News

Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

theguardian.com

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#52
post #39

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…

To be fair, relatively obscure, low budget, and overtly gang-affiliated music is all over Swedish Spotify, it's regularly making the charts.

It's a touchy subject as you're very likely to face accusations of racism and discrimination if you question the overnight popularity of this obscure music genre, so I can see why they'd be especially hesitant to look under this particular rock.

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#53

Seriously? According to the article, their only "proof" is that four criminals said "oh yeah I do this trust me bro". This qualifies as "investigative journalism" today?

Saw this same article on a Finnish news site last week and it indeed feels like clickbait / bullshit reporting with no concrete proof of any of this happening.

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#54

I wonder why Sweden is seeing an increase in criminality. Better seal my lips if I want to keep an account on HN. Why I find interesting is how some topics are basically self-censored whilst we like to pretend we’re having a free discussion.

> Why I find interesting is how some topics are basically self-censored whilst we like to pretend we’re having a free discussion

Propaganda doesn't work because people actually believe it. It works because everyone thinks that everyone else has that information, and that's what the authority wants to believe, so you keep quiet and pretend you believe it. So does everyone else. So in the end everyone complies.

But Solzhenitsyn said it better: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”

It's like these politically correct discussions, everyone knows what the elephant in the room is, but everyone pretends to not see it.

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#55

Seriously? According to the article, their only "proof" is that four criminals said "oh yeah I do this trust me bro". This qualifies as "investigative journalism" today?

In the Swedish coverage they also identified bot farms that are actively used for this purpose. So it's a bit more than hearsay.

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#56
serious question: for pages like OF, spotify, YouTube, what deincentivizes creators from amassing fake subs/followers? Sub count actually matters when getting new subs so (ie: most people are more likely to sub to 1m Youtube subs than 1k subs) wouldnt all creators then seek out fake profiles services when theyre getting started?

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#57
post #26

I have a .com domain that I have been using for many years where a catch-all e-mail is configured. Since some time someone was creating fake Spotify accounts using my domain. I don't have configuration error, no malware or anything like that and I contacted my e-mail service provider Zoho to check this out and they are positive that the e-mails I'm receiving from Spotify are authentic and there's no breach on their p…

This happened to me on one of my domains, and Spotify support was similarly useless.

I finally resolved it by resetting the passwords and deleting 5-10 accounts a day, until the spammers decided continued use of my domain wasn’t worth their time.

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#58
post #47

Seriously? According to the article, their only "proof" is that four criminals said "oh yeah I do this trust me bro". This qualifies as "investigative journalism" today?

Judging by the quality of journalism these days, yes this qualifies as investigative journalism.

People get the quality of journalism they pay for I guess...

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#59

serious question: for pages like OF, spotify, YouTube, what deincentivizes creators from amassing fake subs/followers? Sub count actually matters when getting new subs so (ie: most people are more likely to sub to 1m Youtube subs than 1k subs) wouldnt all creators then seek out fake profiles services when theyre getting started?

You are not wrong that big content-creators can more easily get 1000 new followers than someone starting from scratch. But the amount of followers is only one metric that for example the YT-algorithm uses. Viewer-retention, amount of comments, amount of videos posted and the length of plus probably hundreds of other metrics are important as well and only ticking one of those boxes will only get you so far

Re: Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money

#60
post #55

Seriously? According to the article, their only "proof" is that four criminals said "oh yeah I do this trust me bro". This qualifies as "investigative journalism" today?

In the Swedish coverage they also identified bot farms that are actively used for this purpose. So it's a bit more than hearsay.

Bot farms is wildly different than money laundering.
Post reply on HN