I’m always on the hunt for new music and never use music-rental programs like Spotify/Qobuz, which means I spend most of my time surfing Bandcamp. Lately, I’ve noticed a huge increase in band pages that don’t actually sell music. Instead, they feature a lengthy album review and a link to an external website where you can supposedly download the album.
These are scams. Spammers are registering unclaimed Bandcamp usernames for artists like The Murder City Devils, Shudder to Think, and DJ Spooky. The spammers then claim that band’s URL (ie “DJSpooky.Bandcamp.com”) and use it to drive traffic to scam sites like “booop.lol/2e29”, which then asks the user for a credit card in order to download the album.
To make detection harder, the scammers rotate through dozens of domains, including ccut.blog, iwave.surf, and xflac.top. The landing pages all appear to use the same template. To get a sense of the scale, try changing the page identifier in one of the URLs (for example, booop.lol/1111 or booop.lol/xxxx) and you’ll find page after page impersonating different artists. Each page even changes the copyright notice to make it look like it’s maintained by the original artist.
If you come across one of these pages, click the Report link in the right-hand sidebar to notify Bandcamp. I’ve reported around 50 of these accounts over the past few months, and those were just the ones I encountered while browsing normally.
I don’t know how many fake Bandcamp accounts exist, but I’ve found around 50 simply through ordinary searches for artists I already listen to. That suggests the problem is widespread enough that many users are likely encountering these pages without realizing they’re fraudulent.
I contacted Bandcamp’s press department in May to ask about the increase in fake artist accounts and how the company is addressing them, but I haven’t yet received a response, so I figured I’d help spread the word about this problem.
Leave a Reply