Last week, journalists’ cooperative 404 media reported on Spy Pet, a website that crawled through billions of Discord messages from nearly 620 million users and sold access to that data for just $5. After investigating the matter, Discord announced that the accounts associated with this repository have been suspended and the company is considering legal action.
Accordingly on April 26th 404 media StorySpy Pet has been crawling around 14,000 Discord servers for several months, collecting tons of user data through “self-botting,” accounts managed by a program or script that automates actions — such as user login attempts — that could disrupt the platform. Because Spy Pet was able to bypass Discord’s processes, these accounts were able to easily join servers, even those associated with games like Minecraft And Among us, and searched them for details such as the other servers that users were members of, their messages posted on those servers, and the voice channels they had joined or left. Because Discord views self-botting as “Platform abuse“The online chat room company is finally doing something about it.
In a statement about it 404 mediasaid a Discord spokesperson that scraping its services and self-botting are violations of the company’s rights Community Guidelines And Terms of Use. Discord has therefore blocked the accounts and is considering appropriate legal action.
“Our security team carefully investigated this activity and we identified specific accounts that we believe were associated with the Spy.pet website, which we subsequently suspended,” the spokesperson said. “Our investigation revealed that the accounts accessed Discord servers that were open and accessible to anyone or where the accounts had easy access to a valid invite link. In these areas, these accounts could only access the same information as all other users on these servers.”
In addition to servers associated with games, Spy Pet bots have also mined chat rooms associated with cryptocurrencies. It doesn’t seem like Spy Pet could comb through a user’s private messages, but the fact that the bots can easily capture so much information and compile it on a website and sell it for cash is a little frightening. Funnily enough, before the site went offline, 404 media reports that Spy Pet advertised itself as a service for people who wanted to stalk their friends (weird), for law enforcement who wanted to buy user data (weirder), and for anyone who wanted to train AI (weirder). Unfunny enough 404 media found that Spy Pet had ties to the harassment forum Kiwi Farms, with Discord stating that the bots’ owner was a member there.
My city asked Discord for further comment.
