This is such nonsense. The gangs would be losing something like 90% or more of their money in the process. The only 'proof' stated in the article is a bunch of unverified claims by anonymous sources.
This scheme doesn't sound very plausible indeed, given the low payout artists get from Spotify.
Or maybe these gangs are just experimenting new ways to launder money, and haven't figured it out yet.
Given how little spotify gives to artists, I can't imagine this being a cost effective way to launder your money at all.
Yeah, I could see Steam, or the App/Play stores. 30% is a meaningful split, but it could be a reasonable layer of isolation in exchange. But Spotify?
Not even just Spotify, but first to some other 3rd party that then takes their own cut first. Utter ridiculous logic.
Also with an app you just buy it. If the app is like 10 euros that's pretty fast. But with Spotify you need to listen to streams for hours and hours, it's fucking slow.
I'm pretty sure nobody is actually listening to the songs... they would just be playing them in an empty room. Probably with a bunch of devices playing the songs at once.
I understand, but even than playing a song is much more effort (time consuming) than buying an app. It's just super inefficiënt.
Can't wait to hear the new Swedish House Mafia X Swedish Criminal Gang ReMix to drop!
This seems like FUD. It's weird.
Half a cent at a time.
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Criminal gangs behind a rise in bombings and shootings in Sweden in recent years are using fake Spotify streams to launder money, a Swedish newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Criminal networks have for several years been using money from drug deals, robberies, fraud and contract killings to pay for false Spotify streams of songs published by artists with ties to the gangs, an investigative report in Svenska Dagbladet claimed.
He said his gang began using Spotify for money laundering in 2019, around the time Swedish gangster rap became popular in the country and started winning music awards.
Describing the process, he said the gangs would convert their dirty cash to bitcoin, then used the cryptocurrency to pay people who sold fake streams on Spotify, which is a Swedish company.
The anonymous investigative police officer told Svenska Dagbladet he contacted Spotify in 2021 to discuss the matter but the company never returned his call.
The Swedish company said it was not aware of any contact made by law enforcement, nor had it found “any data or hard evidence that indicates that the platform is being used at scale in the fashion described”.
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