Discord bans several accounts that stole messages from 620 million users

Discord, one of the most popular social applications among gamers, has banned a series of accounts linked to a website that was dedicated to collecting and selling millions of messages from platform users.

The incident occurs just over a week after 404 Media exposed Spy.Pet, a website that collected and sold millions of Discord users’ messages using bots, which extracted data from 14,000 servers, including gaming servers like Minecraft, accumulating information from nearly 620 million users, according to Kotaku.

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After an investigation conducted shortly after the 404 Media disclosure, Discord banned several accounts linked to the website. The platform claims that these accounts only had access to the information available to any user on the servers.

The administrators of Spy.Pet admitted that some of their bots were banned, but denied that the removal of the website was related to this, and expressed their intention to recover the website domain and continue managing it. At the same time, Discord has announced that it is considering taking “appropriate legal actions”.

This action takes place three months after Discord laid off over 170 employees, attributing the layoffs to the rapid growth during the pandemic. Discord CEO Jason Citron mentioned in an internal email that the company’s rapid growth during the pandemic led them to take on more projects and become less efficient in their operations.

These layoffs are the largest in Discord’s history to date, after the messaging app laid off 4% of its workforce in August of last year. To make matters worse, these layoffs add to the ongoing layoffs in the tech sector, such as those carried out by Google and Amazon earlier this year.

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