Is this not true? I mean, I guess if you’ve not technically been caught yet, then obviously implying and using the word “always” is wrong. Maybe the better way to put it is rather than “always” getting caught, greed will always “increase the chances” of you getting caught when doing something illegal? Never mind the celebrities and ultra mega rich athletes. I’m referring to someone who is a nobody, maybe a regular 9-5er, a random John Doe, etc. If this person happens to come up with a scheme or money glitch that allows one to illegally gain a large amount of money, wouldn’t the smart thing to do is to not draw attention to yourself? Wouldn’t the smart thing to do is to randomize the payments/glitch/scheme so that the legitimate people who are actually paying the money have a harder time pointing you out from the other schemers? Would it be that impossible to believe that others like you have also come across this glitch and likely doing the same thing?
Here’s an incredible story by Matt Levin of Bloomberg regarding how someone got caught implementing a scheme to fraud the music streaming service, Spotify, into paying him royalties for bogus songs and streams as an “artist”.
Original article: Fake Songs Made Real Money – Bloomberg
Bypass paywall: Fake Songs Made Real Money – Bloomberg (archive.fo)
Honestly it’s hard to get mad at him? I suppose if you’re a musician it’s not that hard: Spotify pays about $9 billion a year in royalties, so if he’s skimming $1.2 million a year then that reduces every other musician’s share of the pie by about 0.01%, and you know he’s not the only guy doing this.
This dude did so much pre-work to hatch and implement this plan. It worked. Yet, he didn’t think someone was actually going to notice the weird ass song and artists names that were artificially generated? I mean, I guess no one did for at time, considering he skimmed almost $10mln from the scheme before he was caught.
At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.
Imagine if he scaled down his operations so that it made it less obvious that millions of streams were going to bogus no fame songs with bogus artist and song names. Alas, no. He likely went balls to the wall due to greed and had his bots generate the streams non-stop. Maybe he did at one point in time proceeded with caution? There’s no way one can believe he just went from 0 to a 100 initially, especially during the beginning stages of the scheme. Once he found out that it worked, he must have then kept ratcheting up the bots and streams. My question is, how did dude do his taxes?
The Mindless Catalog 
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