Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swift

After pleading guilty, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, Michael Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate songs for a scheme that stole millions from music streaming platforms.

In a press release Tuesday, the US Department of Justice said that Smith is the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud.

First charged in 2024, Smith successfully ran the scheme for seven years without detection.

Starting in 2017, Smith began using fake email accounts and “fraudulently obtained debit cards” to create “thousands of fraudulent accounts” on services including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the DOJ said. He then employed software that pushed the bots to continuously stream songs that he claimed to own, which the DOJ said were AI-generated.

By his arrest in 2024, he had created “hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs,” then dispersed billions of automated streams among them so that the bots could avoid raising any red flags by all targeting the same song at once. All together, the fake songs generated substantially more streams than some of the most popular artists today, however. According to the DOJ, in a glaring example from April 2023, Smith’s fake songs were fraudulently streamed 80.9 million times during that month, while Taylor Swift’s entire catalog only got 9.3 million streams during the same time period.