- Discord has banned accounts linked to Spy.Pet, a website known for extracting and selling the messages of millions of users.
- Spy.Pet used bots to scrape data from 14,000 servers, affecting nearly 620 million Discord users.
- Discord says it is considering legal action over the citation.
Discord has banned several accounts linked to a website that scraped and sold messages to millions of users.
404 Media first reported on Spy.Pet, a website that mined millions of messages from Discord users and sold access to that information to anyone willing to pay.
Discord is a very popular group chat app. Originally designed for gamers, the app has become a platform for all kinds of communities thanks to its voice chat, video chat, and other features like live streaming.
The site used bots to scrape user messages and other data from 14,000 Discord servers. Using bot accounts, bots would enter popular public servers for games like Minecraft and then collect information about everyone on the server, such as which other servers they are members of, according to 404.
In total, the bots collected data from nearly 620 million Discord users, according to Kotaku.
Following the report, Discord announced that it had banned several accounts linked to the site after an investigation.
“Based on our investigation, these accounts accessed Discord servers that were open and accessible to anyone or where the accounts had easy access to a valid invite link,” Discord told 404 in a statement. “Once in these spaces, these accounts could only access the same information as any other user on these servers.”
Spy.Pet administrators acknowledged that Discord had banned some of its bots, but claimed that the removal of its website was unrelated, according to PC Gamer.
Spy.Pet administrators said on Telegram that they intended to reclaim their website domain and continue the site, PC Gamer reported. Discord added that it was considering “appropriate legal action,” according to 404.
The crackdown follows layoffs at Discord in January for more than 170 employees. In an email to staff, CEO Jason Citron blamed the layoffs on the company’s rapid growth during the pandemic.
“We have grown rapidly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing our workforce 5x since 2020,” Citron said in an email obtained by The Verge. “As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in the way we operated.”
Discord did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on Saturday.
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