Man Sentenced for Using Bots and AI Songs in $8 Million Streaming Fraud

Summary

Michael Smith, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to an artificial-intelligence-assisted music-streaming fraud scheme. The US Department of Justice described him as the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud. Beginning in 2017, Smith used fake email accounts and fraudulently obtained debit cards to create thousands of accounts on Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. He used software to make bots continuously stream songs he claimed to own, with the songs described by prosecutors as AI-generated. By his 2024 arrest, he had created hundreds of thousands of songs and distributed billions of automated streams across them so the activity would be harder to detect. In April 2023, the fake songs generated 80.9 million streams, compared with 9.3 million streams for Taylor Swift’s entire catalog during the same month. The Justice Department said the scheme reduced royalties available to legitimate artists by drawing from shared streaming pools. The court ordered Smith to forfeit $8,091,843.64 in addition to the prison sentence. His lawyers sought probation, arguing that he did not personally keep $8 million and that incarceration would delay repayment; they also said he had been offered audio-production work. Prosecutors argued that Smith had used increasingly deceptive tactics, lied to investigators, and required a stronger sentence to deter similar fraud.