topic Re: Surely this is a bot? in Content Questions

Surely this is a bot?

dbuniverse — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 06:24:25 GMT

A user is following me and over two thousand other accounts, most of the others with "db" in the name. The user in question is m_a_f_ekensta_m This is peculiar. Anyone have any ideas why someone would do this? Mafekenstan, are you for real? Can you respond to comment?

Re: Surely this is a bot?

user-removed — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 18:21:31 GMT

@dbuniverse

Hello:

What I can do is escalate this post for you and have a Spotify Mod check the user, and see exactly what kind of account it is and find out for you if this is just a spam bot account or some sort of content provider account?

Re: Surely this is a bot?

dbuniverse — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 04:30:25 GMT

Thanks. Another user is following me now. Their username is owebinliebriunhton

If you browse through their 3,000+ followers, you'll see most have DB in the name. Like my name.

It appears to be driven by a machine. A Spotify user data harvester of some sort.

I think a direct way to combat this creepy issue is to implement a block mechanism. I'm on the Linux Preview and I haven't got that option.

Re: Surely this is a bot?

aurantiumdulcis — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 13:14:24 GMT

Yes, I have the exact same problem. I have 3 of these followers, all of them with weird names written in capitals (NFGRFJFNY, OWEBINDINOWEUNIORUNI and PDRIEJOPPP). When you look them up, you can see that they have no profile pics nor playlists but they follow a lot (over 1K) of artists and people, in this case ALL of them have CH in their names (like mine). So there seems to be many of these bot accounts following users automatically based on combinations of letters. I hope Spotify could have a look at this issue and give us the possibility to report/block them, since their purpose can be no good. For now, there is a "report" button if you right-click someone, but it is greyed out.

Re: Surely this is a bot?

aurantiumdulcis — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 15:15:53 GMT

I posted about this about a year ago, in reply to someone else having this same issue.... I still have those accounts following me and got no reply. Now I will provide screenshots. You can see that these user accounts all have some things in common: no activity at all, no profile pictures, strange names that seem made by a cat walking on a keyboard and they follow thousands of artists and users, all of them "casually" having a given combination of 2 letters in their names (in this case, C and H). If someone else also has encountered this or knows something about it, please feel free to reply. @dbuniverse, did you ever get rid of them? Did you find any solution?

I understand Spotify can't probably control all the user accounts that are made*, and that as long as my account doesn't seem hacked this is not a big issue maybe, but it is somewhat suspicious anyway. Why do someone create accounts that follow people and artists based on 2-letter combinations? And anyway, what if I simply don't want them following me? At least give us the option to remove or block followers.

(*although I can't help thinking how I have to pass a **bleep** of a captchas here in order to prove I'm not a robot and post something while there seem to be bot accounts around. Don't you also enforce captchas to create an account? Well, I guess they are made by some human... 🙄)