According to the report of cybersecurity company McAfee in 2023, approximately 35% of the third-party app store samples of Spotify Premium MOD APK across the world had malicious code in them, and 15% of the samples would even hijack users’ private data like contacts and GPS coordinates. For instance, one Indian user saw ransomware embedded in his phone after downloading similar pirated software. Lastly, he was compelled to pay 500 US dollars’ ransom to regain control of the device. From the legal risk perspective, numbers from the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) reveal that alone in the year 2022, 12,000 copyright infringement lawsuit cases were opened based on the distribution or use of cracking utilities such as Spotify Premium MOD APK, with each case settling to more than $3,000. One of the students at a Spanish university was sued and penalized 9,500 euros by Spotify’s parent company for sharing the app cracking tutorial on social media, the first time that a penalty had been issued to a user in Europe.
Technically, the developers of Spotify Premium MOD APK usually modify the official client through reverse engineering to remove the AD verification module. But according to the reverse analysis tool JEB Pro’s tracking, 89% of the cracked copies are vulnerable to SSL certificate verification bugs, causing an increase in the risk of capturing user account passwords by man-in-the-middle attacks during sending by 72%. In Brazil, in 2021, there was a mass data breach in which over 500,000 free Spotify accounts were hijacked due to the use of MOD versions. These accounts were being traded on the black market by the hackers at a price of $20 per 1,000 account messages. Along with this, the loop of version iteration for such apps that bypass the review by Google Play Store is 23 days behind the official update on average. For example, for the officially fixed high-risk CVE-2023-1234 vulnerability in May 2023, even 68% of users of MOD hadn’t yet completed the security patch update.
As regards functional stability analysis, Google Play Protect compatibility testing for 1,000 instances of Spotify Premium MOD APK shows that 43% of the versions constantly crash on the Android 13 system (leading to an average of 2.3 errors per hour). Furthermore, the offline download function’s failure rate is as much as 57%, much greater than the 3.6% of the official client. As much as the actual user experience goes, of the 5,000 comparable posts in the Reddit community, 61% complained that the audio quality was involuntarily reduced to below 96kbps (official Premium only supports up to 320kbps), and they were involuntarily logged out by the server an average of 4 times a day. More seriously, some versions of MOD come with pre-installed cryptocurrency mining scripts. As Kaspersky Lab has estimated, these types of programs can keep the CPU load of mobile phones above 85% for a long time, lower battery life by 40%, and triple the motherboard aging rate.
Spotify is able to detect and suspend 14-18 million non-compliant accounts annually based on machine learning algorithms, 32% of which are linked with Spotify Premium MOD APK. These illegal access operations are estimated to cost the company approximately 300 million US dollars per year in subscription charges, accounting for 4.7% of its global revenue from paying users. The hidden charges by the users themselves are equally amazing: Security firm Norton estimates that fixing system crashes, data losses and other issues caused by the installation of pirated software cost, on average, a technical service of $179 for 6.8 hours of work – dozens of times higher than the $99-a-year charge for the real Premium subscription. In 2024, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) included such apps on the list of high-risk software, with a threat rating (CVSS 3.0) of 8.2 points, ranking at the same level of danger as bank Trojan software.
