I might be wrong, but this sounds like bullshit.

Can you imagine the conversion rate between “Paying for fake plays” -> Spotify royalty checks?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Criminal gangs behind a rise in bombings and shootings in Sweden in recent years are using fake Spotify streams to launder money, a Swedish newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Criminal networks have for several years been using money from drug deals, robberies, fraud and contract killings to pay for false Spotify streams of songs published by artists with ties to the gangs, an investigative report in Svenska Dagbladet claimed.

He said his gang began using Spotify for money laundering in 2019, around the time Swedish gangster rap became popular in the country and started winning music awards.

Describing the process, he said the gangs would convert their dirty cash to bitcoin, then used the cryptocurrency to pay people who sold fake streams on Spotify, which is a Swedish company.

The anonymous investigative police officer told Svenska Dagbladet he contacted Spotify in 2021 to discuss the matter but the company never returned his call.

The Swedish company said it was not aware of any contact made by law enforcement, nor had it found “any data or hard evidence that indicates that the platform is being used at scale in the fashion described”.

The original article contains 426 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Swedish gangster rap is quite big in Sweden, with loads of controversies too. The most streamed gangster rapper got kidnapped and murdered - in two separate events.

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Higher streams lead to higher payouts from Spotify. The newspaper said that in Sweden, amassing a million streams pays about 40,000 to 60,000 kronor (£2,800 to £4,300).

Yeah gangs out there killing and dealing over $4k / month. Stupid article makes no sense whatsoever.