Spam in Spotify Podcasts

3 weeks ago 3

There are a significant amount of spam podcasts with malicious / spam links in their description.

Observed titles are: (EPUB) <book_name> or (PDF) <book_name> , with links to random sites. Presumably the goal is to trick people into clicking the links as they attempt to pirate books/audiobooks etc.listinglisting

Screenshot 2024-10-01 9.32.09 AM.png

I'm sure there are more topics/keywords that I am not observing, those are just trivial examples.

There doesn't appear to be an option in in-app context menus to report spam/malicious podcasts, or report the spambot user accounts.

I do see a 'report spam' form on web, however that doesn't scale to the problem.

https://support.spotify.com/us/content-policy-reporting/

I'd suggest Spotify assign their abuse team to triage this issue and refine detections.

I work in this space, understand that it's whack-a-mole and an arms race with the spammers, so this is meant as a blameless FYI.

Platform/OS/plan are irrelevant to this issue. Presumably results would be in different languages in different locales so I can't speak to that.

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