Message History of 600 Million Discord Users Can be Accessed For $5

As if the earlier kerfuffle surrounding the addition of sponsored ads wasn’t enough, Discord has now found itself embroiled in a new controversy revolving around a scraping service that collects the messaging platform users’ data and tracks their messages shared across various servers.

As exposed in a recent writeup by the 404 Media team, the service known as Spy Pet is actively scraping Discord servers on a large scale, archiving and monitoring users’ messages and activities across various servers, including their voice channel interactions. This data is then sold for as little as $5 in crypto, with the report mentioning that the purposes for which this data is sold include training AI models and assisting law enforcement agencies.

The publication further reveals that Spy Pet currently holds a database of more than 3 billion messages, gathered by tracking over 14,000 servers and 600 million users. With Discord allegedly boasting around 614 million registered users as of January 2024, this implies that the website in question is consistently monitoring the overwhelming majority of them.