Discord has banned an unknown number of accounts that were using bots to scrape messages from up to 620 million users and sold them to other companies.
An investigation by 404 Media (paywall), spotted by Eurogamer, found that these bots had archived over four billion public messages, including voice messages, from some of Discord’s most popular servers — including ones for video games such as Among Us and Minecraft.
The data was then sold via a website, Spy.pet, for $5 / £4, targeting companies that wanted to use these messages to train AI models or for “federal agents looking for a new source of intel.”
