Hijacked Sanderson Jones podcast restored after cloned-voice episodes earned $1,293

Sanderson Jones regained control of his dormant podcast feed after it was taken over, renamed and used to publish material narrated in what Hyperfixed described as an AI clone of his voice. The copy earned $1,293 during roughly four months under hijackers’ control, and RSS.com paid that money to Jones while helping return the show to him.

Jones’s original podcast, “Lifefulness: Live Life Fully,” last released a genuine episode on Oct. 14, 2021. In May, new episodes appeared under the title “Life Full On,” retaining the original programme’s episode numbering. Hyperfixed, the Alex Goldman-hosted show, investigated the case in an episode released Oct. 22, saying the stolen feed and cloned voice were being used to make Jones say things he would not say in real life.

The copied show had first appeared on Spreaker four days before its first new episode. It then moved to RSS.com in late June in a single upload that took three and a half minutes. By Oct. 14, Apple Podcasts and Spotify were again displaying Jones’s original show.

The first three replacement episodes were reworded versions of material from the unrelated podcast “Therapy in a Nutshell.” Later episodes shortened and reworded sermons by Myles Munroe and Joshua Selman; one episode credited Selman in its description.

There is a limit to what could be independently established from the audio itself. Scott Seligman, who examined the case, said he could not determine whether the narrator was human or computer-generated. But Acast’s support team identified a different email address as having taken over Jones’s account, although the means of access was unknown.

Importing a public RSS feed does not require access to the producer’s account. Redirecting established Apple Podcasts and Spotify listings to a copied feed does, according to Seligman, who suspected a redirect within Jones’s account moved both listings. He said a dormant programme can be an appealing target because it retains followers and advertising potential while its owner may not check it regularly.

The case exposed a wider weakness in podcast distribution. Podnews found 1,778 shows copied into Spreaker and listed in Apple Podcasts alongside their originals. Spreaker’s free import tool lets users paste in a public RSS address, copying audio and episode metadata without notifying the original producer or verifying ownership; it can then check hourly for new episodes. Spreaker, which is owned by iHeart, said it did not condone uploads by people without rights and acted on terms-of-service violations.

One technical protection is the podcast:locked tag, intended to tell hosting platforms whether an RSS feed may be imported. A value of “yes” instructs a new platform to reject an import attempt. Spreaker said it honours the tag, but Seligman found it in none of about 9,800 Acast feeds he checked. In a scan of roughly 352,000 feeds, he found no other case matching Jones’s combination of a hijacked listing and cloned voice.