Spy.pet, a website that sold billions of Discord chat logs, has been taken offline by the chat app provider. Discord accounts associated with the service also appear to have been banned from the service.
Discord itself confirmed the news and said that the site and the database it was selling violated its terms of service.
In a statement to The Register, a company spokesperson said: “Scraping and self-botting of our services violates our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. In addition to banning affiliated accounts, we will consider appropriate legal action. “
Last week, news broke that a website was selling more than 4 billion public messages created by approximately 620 million users logged into more than 14,000 servers.
Since the data had already been made public, it appeared on the surface that no wrongdoing had occurred. Discord is essentially an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) service, which means that with the right bots and automation, all that data can be collected.
backup domain
The website promoted the database as something that could be used by law enforcement agencies and companies looking to train AI models based on large-scale logs of human interactions. Another option was to spy on people.
The service used an unknown number of Discord accounts that accessed open servers and servers with simple invite links. Despite the data being publicly available, Discord acknowledged that it too is prohibited. Some of the accounts involved in data scraping were also suspended.
“We identified a particular account that we believed was associated with the Spy.pet website, and we have since banned this account.”
Spy.pet website administrators reportedly told their followers on Telegram that they were working on preparing a backup domain, but the site was still listed as offline at the time of writing.