Wow, gotta hand it to criminals, they sure are imaginative… makes me wonder why the don’t just go legit, with innovative thinking like this they could be very successful…
Essentially the process is:
- Gang related rappers sets up song on Spotify
- Gang pays 3rd party companies for fake streams of those Spotify songs (ie similar to how you can pay 3rd party companies for fake Likes on social)
- Spotify pays out the money to the rappers based on how many streams their songs get
Describing the process, he said the gangs would convert their dirty cash to bitcoin and then use the cryptocurrency to pay people who sold fake streams on Spotify – which is a Swedish company.
They “made sure we ended up at the top of the charts”, he said, adding that the fake streams also led to an uptick in real streams.
Higher streams lead to higher payouts from Spotify.
The Straits Times
