Malicious links / spam in podcast descriptions - no way to report in-app

[dissembledstar]

There are a significant amount of spam podcasts with malicious / spam links in their description.

Observed titles are: (EPUB) <book_name> or (PDF) <book_name> , with links to random sites. Presumably the goal is to trick people into clicking the links as they attempt to pirate books/audiobooks etc.listing

 

I'm sure there are more topics/keywords that I am not observing, those are just trivial examples.

There doesn't appear to be an option in in-app context menus to report spam/malicious podcasts, or report the spambot user accounts.

I do see a 'report spam' form on web, however that doesn't scale to the problem.

https://support.spotify.com/us/content-policy-reporting/

I'd suggest Spotify assign their abuse team to triage this issue and refine detections.

I work in this space, understand that it's whack-a-mole and an arms race with the spammers, so this is meant as a blameless FYI.

Platform/OS/plan are irrelevant to this issue. Presumably results would be in different languages in different locales so I can't speak to that.

[Dessi]

Hi there @dissembledstar,

Thanks for reaching out!

Currently, the only way to report such content is through the link you sent and by following the form for Deceptive content in this case. The right team will go through the report afterwards and take appropriate measures. We really appreciate you flagging this!

Take care.