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Swedish criminal gangs using fake Spotify streams to launder money | Spotify
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
135 points (95.9% liked)
Technology
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I’ve been getting a lot of ads on instagram for Spotify playlists. I wonder if that has anything to do with it, because how else would you make money from a playlist of all things?
Spotify pays artists based on how many listens their songs get, so if you can get a bunch of bots to stream your music over and over you can get a legitimate income stream.
In this case, they’re using their illegal income to pay people to use a botnet to stream their songs - which then means they have a nice legal income instead.
Interestingly enough there seem to be two types of playlists that get pushed in ads. One is a normal one with a big variety of artists. That seems the least profitable to me. The other only has songs by one “artist” that seems to only have remixes of popular songs. That’s the sketchy one, in my opinion.