Discord Messages for Sale: Spy Pet Raises Alarms
A service called Spy Pet has raised alarms among Discord users by offering archival and activity tracking services on the platform for a nominal fee of $5.
Spy Pet enables third parties, potentially including law enforcement and criminals, to view messages from specific users across various servers. The Spy Pet website claims that its database contains over 3 billion messages from 600 million users, spanning more than 14,000 servers.
According to official statements on its website, Spy Pet scans Discord servers, selling access to the collected information for cryptocurrency. Additionally, the data is offered for AI training and law enforcement use.
An investigation by 404 Media confirmed that Spy Pet indeed extracts messages from Discord servers and provides them to clients. Access costs range from $5 to $500 in cryptocurrency. For the minimum price, a user receives 500 Spy Pet credits. Searching for a single user’s data costs 10 credits (about $0.10).
After a user search, the service displays the servers they are part of, linked accounts on other sites, and a table of their recent messages (including the server name where the message was posted, the timestamp, and the message content itself). Users can also export chats to a CSV file. Journalistic verification confirmed that the messages provided by Spy Pet are accurate.
On the section of the website listing various servers, a total of over 86,000 servers are mentioned. However, Spy Pet collects data from only some of these (more than 14,000). This is explained by the absence of Spy Pet bots on some servers, hence the tool “does not track the server but knows that such a server exists.” The service also failed to find data for some users, likely indicating that they were not part of the scanned servers.
The difference between channel messages and personal messages lies in their confidentiality: they are not entirely public like tweets, yet not as private as personal correspondence. The creators of Spy Pet emphasize their serious commitment to client confidentiality, asserting that searches on their platform are secure and remain private.
This represents a significant shift in user privacy on Discord, as Spy Pet allows for an overview of their activity. Despite this, the creator of the service emphasizes that it can help users better understand where and how their friends operate on Discord, as well as assist OSINT specialists.
Discord representatives have stated that an investigation into Spy Pet is currently underway. The company has expressed its intention to take appropriate actions if any violations of Discord’s rules are established.
