Ads to access Spotify Premium, Netflix Premium, Pornhub and VPN services are flourishing in Russia — be it on the darkness or on legitimate classifieds platforms such as Avito.
Russian business daily Kommersant found no fewer than 60 ads to access Spotify, most often offering offer to join a foreign family account.
Meanwhile, 57 Spotify account sellers are currently working on a specialized marketplace.
Prices start from as low as 20 rubles ($0.25 at the pre-war exchange rate) per month.
These are often stolen accounts, said Leonid Bezvershenko, a cybersecurity expert at Kaspersky Lab, in an exchange with Kommersant. “The risks for a potential buyer are high, from the use of personal data to attempts to extort money,”
Igor Bederov, head of the research department at T.Hunter, believes that up to 40% of such ads posted on the darknet and on online bulletin boards are fraudulent, “but you can check it only after you bought their product.”
Accounts purchased on the darknet are likely to be valid, said Alexey Drozd, head of the information security department at Serchinform. “But the platform itself, to which access is being sold, can block the user for suspicious activity, for example, due to the fact that the country of origin of the account differs from the IP address,” he notes.
Since Russia began its war in Ukraine, a range of international online services stopped working in Russia, including Netflix, Spotify, Megogo, Deezer.
Source: Kommersant
