Accounts banned for stealing and selling data of millions of users

San Francisco: Messaging application Discord has banned several accounts belonging to a website that receives and sells millions of users’ messages from the platform.

According to 404 Media, a website was extracting millions of users’ messages from Discord and selling them.

Discord is a very popular group chatting app that was originally created for gamers but now the app is used by all communities due to its voice chat, video chat and live streaming among other capabilities.

The website used bots to extract user messages and other data from 14,000 Discord servers. These bots used to enter popular public servers of games like Minecraft and collect information about all server members, such as which other servers these members belong to and so on.

According to Kotaku, these bots collectively collected the data of about 62 million Discord users.

However, Discord announced that the platform had banned several accounts linked to the website after an investigation.