Researchers Uncover Spy Pet: A Service Selling Billions of Discord Messages

Journalists from 404 Media have discovered a service called Spy Pet, whose creator claims to track and archive billions of messages from public Discord servers. The service sells access to this data for as little as $5, allowing users to monitor over 600 million users across more than 14,000 servers.

By searching for a specific user, Spy Pet reveals which servers that person has been seen on, and provides an exportable table of all their messages (including server name, timestamp, and message content). Clients also receive logs showing when a user joined or left specific voice channels, as well as data on linked accounts, such as GitHub profiles.

How Spy Pet Works

404 Media researchers confirmed the service’s functionality by searching for several users and obtaining information on nearly all public Discord servers they had joined, along with the messages they had posted.

In addition to the 14,000 servers where Spy Pet is active, the site lists over 86,000 other servers where the project’s bots are not present, but the creators note, “we know they exist.”

Privacy Concerns and Data Collection

Importantly, Spy Pet does not have access to users’ private messages. The service scrapes public channels within Discord servers and then makes the collected messages available to clients. The creator of Spy Pet told journalists, “I enjoy collecting information, archiving, and challenging myself. Essentially, Discord is the holy grail of scraping, since Discord tries to do everything possible to fight it.”

The minimum payment is about $5 in cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Monero), which gives the client 500 Spy Pet credits. According to the researchers’ tests, searching for a single user on Spy Pet costs 10 credits (or 10 cents).

Typically, messages in Discord channels are not searchable or publicly accessible, unlike blog posts or social media updates. Discord users certainly do not expect their messages, server presence, bans, and other details to be collected by a bot, aggregated, and sold to third parties.

Potential Uses and Discord’s Response

Interestingly, Spy Pet openly invites anyone training AI models, as well as “federal agents looking for new sources of information,” to contact them for collaboration.

Discord representatives told 404 Media that the company is currently investigating whether Spy Pet violates its Terms of Service and community guidelines. If violations are found, Discord promises to take “appropriate steps to ensure compliance.”