Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots, AI Taylor Swift songs
▼ Summary
– Michael Smith, a 54-year-old man from North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for AI-assisted streaming fraud.
– Smith is the first American criminally charged with using artificial intelligence to generate songs for fraudulent streaming schemes.
– The scheme operated undetected for seven years, starting in 2017, by creating thousands of fake accounts on major music platforms.
– He used bot networks to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs, amassing billions of automated streams to avoid detection.
– Fraudulent streams significantly outpaced legitimate artists, with Smith’s fake songs receiving over 80 million streams in a single month.
Michael Smith, a 54-year-old resident of North Carolina, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to orchestrating a massive fraud scheme that exploited music streaming platforms using artificial intelligence. The US Department of Justice announced the sentencing on Tuesday, identifying Smith as the first individual in the United States to face criminal charges for AI-assisted streaming fraud.
The operation ran undetected for seven years before authorities intervened. Beginning in 2017, Smith utilized fake email addresses and fraudulently obtained debit cards to establish thousands of fraudulent accounts across major services such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. He then deployed specialized software to control bot networks that continuously streamed tracks he claimed ownership of. These songs were largely created using AI technology.
By the time his arrest occurred in 2024, Smith had generated hundreds of thousands of AI-produced tracks. To avoid detection algorithms, he distributed billions of automated streams across these numerous files rather than concentrating them on single titles. Despite this dispersion strategy, the volume of fraudulent activity was staggering. According to the DOJ, Smith’s illicit catalog generated more streams than some of the world’s most prominent artists. A notable example from April 2023 showed Smith’s fake songs receiving 80.9 million streams in a single month, compared to just 9.3 million for the entire catalog of Taylor Swift during the same period.
(Source: Ars Technica)
