Internet sleuths tracked down her lost song. She says a bogus version then appeared on streaming platforms

Musician Paula Toledo recently learned one of her songs had found an audience through an unlikely source — bootleg Russian DVDs. But she didn't expect it would lead to a fake version of it streaming online.

Toledo recorded How Long in the 2000s but never released it commercially. It somehow ended up on pirated DVDs, and caught the ears of a small circle of fans, who spent years trying to determine the song's provenance.

Some created tribute videos for How Long that included images of teddy bears. After 16 years of searching, fans on Reddit found Toledo in Vancouver back in December.

Following the discovery, Toledo uploaded How Long to Bandcamp, a music distribution platform, with all proceeds going to charity. She then added it to music streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, using an independent digital music distribution service as a middleman. 

But Reddit users soon notified her that a duplicate version of How Long had appeared on streaming services, she says.

"So they took my song, the exact song, and put new artwork on it with a teddy bear," Toledo said.

The bogus version created confusion, she says, and her version was removed from streaming services.

Toledo suspects her song fell victim to streaming fraud, which experts say is a growing concern for streaming platforms, music distributors and artists.

"It's not lost on me that the song was pirated and it was placed in a Russian bootleg DVD … Then it was found and literally weeks after it got pirated again," Toledo said.

"It's so unfortunate."

Andrew Batey, founder and co-CEO of Beatdapp, a Vancouver-based company that uses technology to help streaming services and distributors sniff out fraud, says most fraud occurs when scammers upload sound files through digital music distribution services to streaming sites.

They then program bots — or steal other people's accounts — to play the tracks over and over to collect royalties. 

The files don't have to contain music. They can consist of things such as whale noises, or ambient sounds, Batey says. Fraudsters also use music recorded by other artists.

"They load hundreds of thousands of songs on the platforms as if they're artists," he said.