The way Spotify allocates stream revenue to artists has been extremely broken for a long time. It's been chock full of scammers for ages.
The problem is that there's some kind of amplification effect where if you pay 10 USD/month for an account and stream 24/7 you can move more than 10 USD/month in the total payout of the platform.
Then I hire some bot farm to listen to my 'Music'.
Then Spotify pays me the ad-revenue since so many people are listening to my music?
So if I can hire the bot farm (and whatever other overhead expenses are needed), I just need to get $50 from ad-revenue to justify spending $100 on bots?
It seems like the bots would cost more? If bots are this cheap, I'd think more people would use them just to pump their numbers.
> It seems like the bots would cost more? If bots are this cheap, I'd think more people would use them just to pump their numbers.
I don't think bot sales platforms are places most people would discover on their own, especially if they are willing to take money that is considered dirty.
They declined interviews with Swedens largest newspaper and their written response was "we have no evidence money laundering is happening on our platform". Safe so say a lot of Swedish people aren't happy with how they're handling this.
The term "Swedish" as used in this headline likely implies to many more than just this pedantic and America-centric definition of nationality. It's fair to bring up that point.
Swedish means from Sweden, these gangs are from Sweden, membership is pretty varied, non-native Swedes, native Swedes from different ancestral ethnicity and completely native Swedes with families being European for a long, long time...
There's no "fair to bring up that point" here, be a better Christian, not a racist one.
Do you think that's what the vast majority of people assume when reading the headline?
Context is everything here. If a headline said "Trump discovers through DNA test he's 100% Swedish," we wouldn't assume your definition of "Swedish." We'd assume it meant genetics.
And likewise, if a headline said, "If you're Swedish you're no longer allowed to own a hunting rifle," you would know pretty easily that meant a citizen of the modern country called Sweden. Because it's about law and how it applies.
In the case of this headline, it is ambiguous. It's fair to say people might assume ethnicity. It's valid to point out that it might not be the case.
There's more reason to not actively suppress talk about what "Swedish" means here: When there's a negative story, people want answers and solutions. If a headline is ambiguous about something, and clearing the ambiguity could get us closer to finding a cause, you're doing something good for everyone. If the perpetrators of the alleged crime here were your every-day indigenous ethnic Swede, you'd assume different causes and different solutions than if it were one of a new arrival from a different country, culture, and ethnicity. Maybe some solutions would be the same, but maybe (and likely) not!
What purpose is there of putting forth this one definition of "Swedish" in exclusion to the others, in the context of this headline and the commenter's pointing out of something true? It only serves to suppress thought.
Sweden's gangs are a product of the failures of the Swedish state to heal socieconomic disparities and integrate all members of society. They are Swedish through and through.
Yeah you know the word "gang" has been diluted and watered down quite a bit.
It used to be groups of armed men who'd rob banks and open fire on anyone who'd be selling drugs who was not their affiliate, oh and also open fire on any small business who'd refuse to pay them for protection.
This Spotify thing seems regular crime, I'd say bordering white collar crime given the non-violent nature of the procedure.
I hope you are very aware you don't help to solve the issue in any possible way by being in this hysterical state of fear.
I don't agree with the naïve approach the Swedish government took on immigration, not much was done to actually bridge cultural and economical gaps, Swedish society has become very individualistic and losing its collectivist sense for a while, from what I gather from older generations since at least the 90s. Without a sense of community to integrate immigrants into different aspects of society, just relying on education of children (and hoping those connections between newly immigrant parents and the larger society will be enough) instead of bringing their parents into the fold to become fully citizens and aligning into shared values was never going to work out.
On the other hand, the problem stemming from this naïvety is here, right now, the solution is not to vote for SD (or AfS, and similarly populists parties) who promise to "crack down on immigration and crime" with non-solutions. The solution is not going to be simple, not going to be to just hire more police with lower standards so the government can say it's filling the ranks of Polisen to fight crime, that will only prolong, and escalate gang wars. Not that the police doesn't need more staffing, it needs, but with smart hiring, not just throwing brutes into the mix with lower standards.
It's exactly what happened when Sweden broke up gangs like Vårbynätverket, the power vacuum fueled more violence, as any country with gang issues has known for a long time. The current government is not really willing to hear about a holistic approach to solve this issue, they want to crack down on crime, and just like the narcotics policy: it won't work, it won't stamp out, gangs exist for multiple social reasons and without tackling that side of the equation there's just an infinite game of whack-a-mole, and as we see it just gets worse, now the criminals recruit 12-15 years old to do their murders for them.
I really hope you can see that there is no easy way out of this, I say that as a Brazilian living here for more than a decade: escalating violence against gangs while escalating the anti-immigration rhetoric in a country with a lot of immigrants already feeling left out of society is just going to make everything worse, I really hope Sweden doesn't go through this know failure path because it can get much uglier.
I'll go a different direction with this.. "nations" are a legal entity and a powerful one, but not the only means of connection in this modern world. Nations want to assert penultimate identity, but it is not true. In fact, financially successful people here on this chat system are actively hopping from one country to another, including for taxation reasons, while everyone points fingers at a group like this and argues their identity.
Identity is a complicated thing and always has been, really, but in these times with financial exchange and travel as active as it is.. the lines are just not that clear.
There is...you're asked about your bank account, then few days later you receive $100,000 along with info to send it to another 5 accounts $20,000 each. Guess what happens next?
Oh, I assumed you were referring to the style of scam where a reversible/essentially phantom payment is made to someone's account (traditionally cheque, but it happens with credit transfers), and they make _real_ payments elsewhere (either via cash, crypto, or more difficult to reverse credit transfer). Initial transfer bounces, victim (or _maybe_ bank, depending) is out 100k.
It's just not that useful in Sweden, I'd assume. You want to get the money into the banking system and stay there. What you describe is easily traceable and reversed. Unless you transfer it abroad to... less civilized countries, it's not really helping you.
I find it really hard to believe that this Spotify scam is more effective than some classic Forex scam.
It has the added benefit of both laundering money and acting as advertisement for criminal gangs. Most of the largest rappers were associated with gangs and the artists even got invited to interviews and got played on radio. Plausibly all this made possible by getting the initial publicity through Spotify.
Unless these gangs have found a way to make money on Spotify, which isn't available to the average artist then I can't imagine it being particularly effective.
The scheme makes no sense to me, but in society like the Swedish where banks are heavily regulated and monitored and where cash is used less and less it might be one of the last ways of laundering money. Still, they are taking SEK, buying crypto, using the crypto to buy fake stream of "music" they put to Spotify to get a meagerly pay out for played streams. The "loses" on each laundered kronor must be immense.
It seems 30% platform commission is pretty standard across digital platforms (apps, books, music). I'm not well versed in the world of money laundry, so I don't know if that's efficient or not. But if you're willing to pay the commission it seems pretty easy to launder money via fake apps/books/music or other digital goods than can be generated with near zero marginal cost.
I have a .com domain that I have been using for many years where a catch-all e-mail is configured. Since some time someone was creating fake Spotify accounts using my domain.
I don't have configuration error, no malware or anything like that and I contacted my e-mail service provider Zoho to check this out and they are positive that the e-mails I'm receiving from Spotify are authentic and there's no breach on their part.
I also contacted Spotify and they are absolutely sure that it's not possible to create accounts without confirming e-mails and can't do anything about it.
I have no idea how these accounts are created without me confirming the e-mail address but they are obviously fake, like a common name and numbers @mydomain .
So I used the forgot my password option to log in to check out what those accounts are doing and they were listening some obscure songs.
At some point, the person running the scheme decided to move to another domain as I received e-mail address change mails, they moved to some random .xyz domains.
Still keep receiving "3-months for free" promo from Spotify for those fake accounts.
> I also contacted Spotify and they are absolutely sure that it's not possible to create accounts without confirming e-mails and can't do anything about it.
Yeah that's not true. We discovered someone was using my son's email address for their Spotify when he tried to register for an account. There are plenty of other accounts of this happening: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Why-Does-Spotify-N...
It might be fixed now, but what you're saying was definitely true for a good few years.
Notice How I keep receiving Spotify promotions for the fake accounts created on my domain. Does this look like Spotify did something about it?
Whatever, I'm not going through all this BS again. Spotify has it's own "Spam box" because it is possible or was possible to create Spotify accounts without verification and a subset of it is created on my domain and I'm not going through the process of fixing up the Spotify's fake account problem.
Someone created these, I tried to inform Spotify about it and if they are find with paying for the streams these accounts (probably) generate, it's all fine by me.
Yeah, ours was to an email account I'd registered for my son but wasn't checking regularly. Once we found out someone else had used it for Spotify I found loads of marketing spam from them in the inbox. I think it is fixed for new accounts but they obviously haven't bothered to go back and verify everyone who registered before that change.
This happened to me on one of my domains, and Spotify support was similarly useless.
I finally resolved it by resetting the passwords and deleting 5-10 accounts a day, until the spammers decided continued use of my domain wasn’t worth their time.
Given my experience and knowledge of how Spotify deals with much-less nefarious uses of fake streams, I'm very skeptical of these claims. There's a significant (several month) delay between a Spotify stream and the artist getting a payout. (This is probably shorter if you're Taylor Swift, but the artist profiles involved here aren't.) During this time Spotify will indeed do some checks for stream legitimacy. It's not hard to detect a song from a completely unknown artist somehow getting 1 million streams from southeast Asia.
Given that and the overall inefficiency of this scheme, my uneducated guess would be the "anonymous gang member" decided to fuck with the reporter by coming up with an outlandish, yet plausible-at-a-surface-level scheme, similar to Tony Soprano messing with his golfing buddies by telling them fake mob stories.[0]
To be fair, relatively obscure, low budget, and overtly gang-affiliated music is all over Swedish Spotify, it's regularly making the charts.
It's a touchy subject as you're very likely to face accusations of racism and discrimination if you question the overnight popularity of this obscure music genre, so I can see why they'd be especially hesitant to look under this particular rock.
If the accounts listening to these white noise streams are paying customers it puts Spotify in a bit of bind, because these people are actually paying to listen to white noise.
The article also mentions the journalist talked to the police who have kind of confirmed it.
The white noise stuff is entirely different from this... the two problems with the white noise podcasts are
1) it sneaks into the recommendation algorithm. There's legitimate reasons to want to listen to white noise, but the likelihood that someone listening to a podcast wants to next listen to 3 hours of white noise is effectively 0.
2) perception of fairness due to the "artist pool" that Spotify uses. Is it fair that a team of musicians, singers, engineers, etc. gets paid the same for a stream as someone who just uploaded 3 hours of white noise? Debatable. (I'm sure this will start happening with AI/procedurally generated music at some point, too.)
The users listening to the white noise are real people who are paying or hearing ads. It's not really relevant to the article at hand.
> The article also mentions the journalist talked to the police who have kind of confirmed it.
> The Swedish company said it was not aware of any contact made by law enforcement
If there's no actual case, it just means someone in law enforcement sent an email. They may have been told the story by the very same "anonymous gang member."
Seriously? According to the article, their only "proof" is that four criminals said "oh yeah I do this trust me bro". This qualifies as "investigative journalism" today?
Saw this same article on a Finnish news site last week and it indeed feels like clickbait / bullshit reporting with no concrete proof of any of this happening.
Yeah it isn't clear how they are doing it. Are they using fake accounts with paid membership or free accounts? Both are ineficient but the latter is way more inefficient
Botted plays are definitely real, but not typically used like this. Typically the scam for botted plays is either someone straight up selling stream purchases i.e. "buy Spotify 10000 plays for $10" or using them to boost perceived legitimacy. You would do the latter with a typical label scam, where you contact someone on Soundcloud, saying you are XXX Record Label and you want to sign their track, linking to XXX Record Label's Spotify account which shows impressive play numbers. You "sign" the track but then request a $50 "mastering fee" from the artist before release.
In either case, Spotify (usually, afaik) doesn't pay out for the actual botted streams, but it doesn't matter. The money is made by the scammer from the artist.
I couldn't find any official statement from the Swedish police about this case. The "proof" is once again that an "anonymous investigative police officer" said it and they assumed it to be true.
I imagine that there might be some degree of truth to this story, but as it's written right now it's pure clickbait.
Aren't these Swedish criminal gangs somehow part of Spotify itself? They at least scratch each other's backs and both make money, by extracting from funds that should go to artists.
> Why I find interesting is how some topics are basically self-censored whilst we like to pretend we’re having a free discussion
Propaganda doesn't work because people actually believe it. It works because everyone thinks that everyone else has that information, and that's what the authority wants to believe, so you keep quiet and pretend you believe it. So does everyone else. So in the end everyone complies.
But Solzhenitsyn said it better:
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
It's like these politically correct discussions, everyone knows what the elephant in the room is, but everyone pretends to not see it.
We've had a rapid uncontrolled population increase, this in combination with a overregulated housing market causes problems.
(housing regulation being rents are controlled for first party renters(artificially low)). This regulation means it's impossible to find a rental where you want to live because nobody builds them (they wouldn't be profitable).
This is not the answer, but it belive it's part of it.
That we increased our population with people who are either not educated or can't get their educations verified is also a problem.
When I was younger I had faith the government was doing what's best for it's people, that's eroded into "these populist aholes will say anything to win votes no matter how it affects people"
The superstrict regulation (but not enforcement, except when it's convenient) on drugs probably doesn't help either. I know a dude that was recently fined 19000 SEK for a couple grams of pot, he went to court and won though.
My country is broken, in a seemingly unbreakable downwards spiral to becoming a first class shithole.
Population increase yes, from immigration. The problems coming from the segregation stem from immigration (almost per definition), not "population increase" which sounds like Sweden experienced a huge baby boom.
Sugar coating the problem or painting a different picture than what it is, is part of the problem. For example, of course there are challenges and costs with immigration, and it doesn't help anyone pretending there aren't. Of course immigration from low-education countries will have on general lower education. Pretending otherwise will ensure they won't get the help they need to become a part of the society. Of course patriarchical society immigrants will generally have a patriarchical mindset. It doesn't help that turning a blind eye to that just because you (not you specifically) is afraid being called a racist for calling that out.
Now, I'm not much better, but from what I recall crime in general is going down - but there are some notable exceptions (gang crime related specifically).
A quick look at the number of shootings over the past six years shows that the number of fatalities in shootings reached a new record in 2022. Moreover, a report published by the Swedish national council for crime prevention in 2021 found that Sweden was the only European country in which the number of fatal shootings per 100,000 inhabitant increased since 2000.
serious question: for pages like OF, spotify, YouTube, what deincentivizes creators from amassing fake subs/followers? Sub count actually matters when getting new subs so (ie: most people are more likely to sub to 1m Youtube subs than 1k subs) wouldnt all creators then seek out fake profiles services when theyre getting started?
You are not wrong that big content-creators can more easily get 1000 new followers than someone starting from scratch. But the amount of followers is only one metric that for example the YT-algorithm uses. Viewer-retention, amount of comments, amount of videos posted and the length of plus probably hundreds of other metrics are important as well and only ticking one of those boxes will only get you so far
I doesn't need to be millions of dollars per day to be happening, and worthwhile for the gangs.
Money laundering works best when you've got a lot of different streams of it, spread across many different economies. You want the dirty money dispersed to as many unrelated people as possible. Because it's easier for 100 people to each do something with $100 of dirty money than for 1 person to do something with $10,000 of dirty money.
And Spotify doesn't have any reason to try to stop it. They're not likely to lose customers of it, and it makes their numbers go up.
> Describing the process, he said the gangs would convert their dirty cash to bitcoin, then used the cryptocurrency to pay people who sold fake streams on Spotify, which is a Swedish company.
Could have swapped to Ether and sold a newly launched NFT collection to themselves
The dirty money holder purchases the collection across several addresses, the “artist” keeps the proceeds and cashes out
Faster, involves less people, plausible deniability with a little marketing campaign
Funny thing is a good chunk of the biggest pop hits (and probably Spotify streams) are rooted in Swedish production. Max Martin alone is tied with George Harrison for production on number of Hot 100 songs[0].
For a population of roughly 10 million Sweden punches WAY above their weight in pop music (as well as other genres).
So we have Swedish gangs manipulating a Swedish platform that also has a lot of music Swedes have had a hand in. Fascinating!
The sums seem too low to be plausible, but other platforms and "talent" could scale a bit better. Scheme would be: cash -> visa gift cards/cryptocurrency -> subscription to "talent" on platform -> legit fee deposits to "management company" -> ...
Some might call that laundering, but most people just call it publishing.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadThe problem is that there's some kind of amplification effect where if you pay 10 USD/month for an account and stream 24/7 you can move more than 10 USD/month in the total payout of the platform.
If I want to launder 100$ using this scheme.
I setup a Spotify Account, to stream my 'Music'.
Then I hire some bot farm to listen to my 'Music'.
Then Spotify pays me the ad-revenue since so many people are listening to my music?
So if I can hire the bot farm (and whatever other overhead expenses are needed), I just need to get $50 from ad-revenue to justify spending $100 on bots?
It seems like the bots would cost more? If bots are this cheap, I'd think more people would use them just to pump their numbers.
I don't think bot sales platforms are places most people would discover on their own, especially if they are willing to take money that is considered dirty.
Who's to say they don't?
If French people start a company in the US, it'll be an American company. Same with these Swedish gangs, it doesn't matter where the people are from.
There's no "fair to bring up that point" here, be a better Christian, not a racist one.
Context is everything here. If a headline said "Trump discovers through DNA test he's 100% Swedish," we wouldn't assume your definition of "Swedish." We'd assume it meant genetics.
And likewise, if a headline said, "If you're Swedish you're no longer allowed to own a hunting rifle," you would know pretty easily that meant a citizen of the modern country called Sweden. Because it's about law and how it applies.
In the case of this headline, it is ambiguous. It's fair to say people might assume ethnicity. It's valid to point out that it might not be the case.
There's more reason to not actively suppress talk about what "Swedish" means here: When there's a negative story, people want answers and solutions. If a headline is ambiguous about something, and clearing the ambiguity could get us closer to finding a cause, you're doing something good for everyone. If the perpetrators of the alleged crime here were your every-day indigenous ethnic Swede, you'd assume different causes and different solutions than if it were one of a new arrival from a different country, culture, and ethnicity. Maybe some solutions would be the same, but maybe (and likely) not!
What purpose is there of putting forth this one definition of "Swedish" in exclusion to the others, in the context of this headline and the commenter's pointing out of something true? It only serves to suppress thought.
It used to be groups of armed men who'd rob banks and open fire on anyone who'd be selling drugs who was not their affiliate, oh and also open fire on any small business who'd refuse to pay them for protection.
This Spotify thing seems regular crime, I'd say bordering white collar crime given the non-violent nature of the procedure.
I know next to nothing about Sweden, not the bombing stats in the article seem staggering to me for a country of that size.
Don't be a racist, it's scum.
You don't fool me into submission with either downvotes or accusations.
I don't agree with the naïve approach the Swedish government took on immigration, not much was done to actually bridge cultural and economical gaps, Swedish society has become very individualistic and losing its collectivist sense for a while, from what I gather from older generations since at least the 90s. Without a sense of community to integrate immigrants into different aspects of society, just relying on education of children (and hoping those connections between newly immigrant parents and the larger society will be enough) instead of bringing their parents into the fold to become fully citizens and aligning into shared values was never going to work out.
On the other hand, the problem stemming from this naïvety is here, right now, the solution is not to vote for SD (or AfS, and similarly populists parties) who promise to "crack down on immigration and crime" with non-solutions. The solution is not going to be simple, not going to be to just hire more police with lower standards so the government can say it's filling the ranks of Polisen to fight crime, that will only prolong, and escalate gang wars. Not that the police doesn't need more staffing, it needs, but with smart hiring, not just throwing brutes into the mix with lower standards.
It's exactly what happened when Sweden broke up gangs like Vårbynätverket, the power vacuum fueled more violence, as any country with gang issues has known for a long time. The current government is not really willing to hear about a holistic approach to solve this issue, they want to crack down on crime, and just like the narcotics policy: it won't work, it won't stamp out, gangs exist for multiple social reasons and without tackling that side of the equation there's just an infinite game of whack-a-mole, and as we see it just gets worse, now the criminals recruit 12-15 years old to do their murders for them.
I really hope you can see that there is no easy way out of this, I say that as a Brazilian living here for more than a decade: escalating violence against gangs while escalating the anti-immigration rhetoric in a country with a lot of immigrants already feeling left out of society is just going to make everything worse, I really hope Sweden doesn't go through this know failure path because it can get much uglier.
Identity is a complicated thing and always has been, really, but in these times with financial exchange and travel as active as it is.. the lines are just not that clear.
I find it really hard to believe that this Spotify scam is more effective than some classic Forex scam.
The scheme makes no sense to me, but in society like the Swedish where banks are heavily regulated and monitored and where cash is used less and less it might be one of the last ways of laundering money. Still, they are taking SEK, buying crypto, using the crypto to buy fake stream of "music" they put to Spotify to get a meagerly pay out for played streams. The "loses" on each laundered kronor must be immense.
I don't have configuration error, no malware or anything like that and I contacted my e-mail service provider Zoho to check this out and they are positive that the e-mails I'm receiving from Spotify are authentic and there's no breach on their part.
I also contacted Spotify and they are absolutely sure that it's not possible to create accounts without confirming e-mails and can't do anything about it.
I have no idea how these accounts are created without me confirming the e-mail address but they are obviously fake, like a common name and numbers @mydomain .
So I used the forgot my password option to log in to check out what those accounts are doing and they were listening some obscure songs.
At some point, the person running the scheme decided to move to another domain as I received e-mail address change mails, they moved to some random .xyz domains.
Still keep receiving "3-months for free" promo from Spotify for those fake accounts.
https://dropovercl.s3.amazonaws.com/208ea6fc-821c-4d51-8c46-...
So yep, I'm sure there are many scams going on in Spotify.
Yeah that's not true. We discovered someone was using my son's email address for their Spotify when he tried to register for an account. There are plenty of other accounts of this happening: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Why-Does-Spotify-N...
It might be fixed now, but what you're saying was definitely true for a good few years.
Whatever, I'm not going through all this BS again. Spotify has it's own "Spam box" because it is possible or was possible to create Spotify accounts without verification and a subset of it is created on my domain and I'm not going through the process of fixing up the Spotify's fake account problem.
Someone created these, I tried to inform Spotify about it and if they are find with paying for the streams these accounts (probably) generate, it's all fine by me.
I finally resolved it by resetting the passwords and deleting 5-10 accounts a day, until the spammers decided continued use of my domain wasn’t worth their time.
Given that and the overall inefficiency of this scheme, my uneducated guess would be the "anonymous gang member" decided to fuck with the reporter by coming up with an outlandish, yet plausible-at-a-surface-level scheme, similar to Tony Soprano messing with his golfing buddies by telling them fake mob stories.[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0D3xkOeMdA
It's a touchy subject as you're very likely to face accusations of racism and discrimination if you question the overnight popularity of this obscure music genre, so I can see why they'd be especially hesitant to look under this particular rock.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-08-17/white-...
If the accounts listening to these white noise streams are paying customers it puts Spotify in a bit of bind, because these people are actually paying to listen to white noise.
The article also mentions the journalist talked to the police who have kind of confirmed it.
1) it sneaks into the recommendation algorithm. There's legitimate reasons to want to listen to white noise, but the likelihood that someone listening to a podcast wants to next listen to 3 hours of white noise is effectively 0.
2) perception of fairness due to the "artist pool" that Spotify uses. Is it fair that a team of musicians, singers, engineers, etc. gets paid the same for a stream as someone who just uploaded 3 hours of white noise? Debatable. (I'm sure this will start happening with AI/procedurally generated music at some point, too.)
The users listening to the white noise are real people who are paying or hearing ads. It's not really relevant to the article at hand.
> The article also mentions the journalist talked to the police who have kind of confirmed it.
> The Swedish company said it was not aware of any contact made by law enforcement
If there's no actual case, it just means someone in law enforcement sent an email. They may have been told the story by the very same "anonymous gang member."
I’m still a little sceptical of this article’s claims, but there is absolutely a problem with fake streams/stream manipulation.
In either case, Spotify (usually, afaik) doesn't pay out for the actual botted streams, but it doesn't matter. The money is made by the scammer from the artist.
Same article mentions further down that the Police have also basically confirmed it is an issue but Spotify aren't acknowledging them.
I imagine that there might be some degree of truth to this story, but as it's written right now it's pure clickbait.
I agree Spotify is a particularly poor choice, but the expected payoff for many criminal activities are also extremely low.
I’m guessing some people tried, and either gave up, or are loosing an absurd fraction of the laundered cash.
Why I find interesting is how some topics are basically self-censored whilst we like to pretend we’re having a free discussion.
Propaganda doesn't work because people actually believe it. It works because everyone thinks that everyone else has that information, and that's what the authority wants to believe, so you keep quiet and pretend you believe it. So does everyone else. So in the end everyone complies.
But Solzhenitsyn said it better: “We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
It's like these politically correct discussions, everyone knows what the elephant in the room is, but everyone pretends to not see it.
(housing regulation being rents are controlled for first party renters(artificially low)). This regulation means it's impossible to find a rental where you want to live because nobody builds them (they wouldn't be profitable).
This is not the answer, but it belive it's part of it.
That we increased our population with people who are either not educated or can't get their educations verified is also a problem.
When I was younger I had faith the government was doing what's best for it's people, that's eroded into "these populist aholes will say anything to win votes no matter how it affects people"
The superstrict regulation (but not enforcement, except when it's convenient) on drugs probably doesn't help either. I know a dude that was recently fined 19000 SEK for a couple grams of pot, he went to court and won though.
My country is broken, in a seemingly unbreakable downwards spiral to becoming a first class shithole.
Sugar coating the problem or painting a different picture than what it is, is part of the problem. For example, of course there are challenges and costs with immigration, and it doesn't help anyone pretending there aren't. Of course immigration from low-education countries will have on general lower education. Pretending otherwise will ensure they won't get the help they need to become a part of the society. Of course patriarchical society immigrants will generally have a patriarchical mindset. It doesn't help that turning a blind eye to that just because you (not you specifically) is afraid being called a racist for calling that out.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Now, I'm not much better, but from what I recall crime in general is going down - but there are some notable exceptions (gang crime related specifically).
Seems like it's flat/down over the last 10 years.
https://www.statista.com/topics/7088/crime-in-sweden/
Money laundering works best when you've got a lot of different streams of it, spread across many different economies. You want the dirty money dispersed to as many unrelated people as possible. Because it's easier for 100 people to each do something with $100 of dirty money than for 1 person to do something with $10,000 of dirty money.
And Spotify doesn't have any reason to try to stop it. They're not likely to lose customers of it, and it makes their numbers go up.
Could have swapped to Ether and sold a newly launched NFT collection to themselves
The dirty money holder purchases the collection across several addresses, the “artist” keeps the proceeds and cashes out
Faster, involves less people, plausible deniability with a little marketing campaign
For a population of roughly 10 million Sweden punches WAY above their weight in pop music (as well as other genres).
So we have Swedish gangs manipulating a Swedish platform that also has a lot of music Swedes have had a hand in. Fascinating!
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
Some might call that laundering, but most people just call it publishing.