Discord Takes Down ‘Spy.pet’ Website that Harvested Data from Hundreds of Millions of Users

Discord recently announced it took down Spy.pet, a data harvesting website that scraped messages from 620 million Discord users from more than 14,000 servers.

The website claimed to have garnered more than 4 billion public messages from the instant messaging platform and was selling access to the massive database to anyone interested, including law enforcement, AI training models, and people spying on their contacts.

Browsing a Database of Scraped Conversations in Exchange for Crypto

Users who wanted to browse the harvested data needed to purchase credits, then spend the credits to access conversation archives, search for servers, and look up profiles. As expected, the service dealt exclusively in cryptocurrency.

Spy.pet has reportedly been running since November 2023, perpetually harvesting data from public Discord chats. However, the nature of the service only recently came to light, prompting Discord to look into the matter and address the situation.

Discord Briefly Took Action

"Scraping our services and self-botting are violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. In addition to banning the affiliated accounts, we are considering appropriate legal action," a Discord representative told The Register. "We identified certain accounts that we believe are affiliated with the Spy.pet website, which we have subsequently banned."

Service Harvested Public Data from Open Chats

Spy.pet used accounts to infiltrate open Discord servers or ones that could be easily accessed via invite links, then initiated the data harvesting.

It’s worth noting that the service could only access public server data; in other words, Spy.pet operators could only see what any other server user could.

Site Taken Down, Access to Infiltrated Servers Revoked

After it was spotted, the service started to lose access to the servers it managed to slither into, gradually dropping to zero, as of last week.

The website was then taken down on Friday of last week, as a Telegram account allegedly belonging to its administrator confirmed. The account owner said the service may be resurrected through a domain backup, but it seems still down so far.