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Michael Smith sentenced in AI music streaming fraud case

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2026-10-11 03:17 UTC → 2026-10-11 11:15 UTC · added ~~removed~~

Michael Smith, a 54-year-old musician from Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced in a Manhattan federal court to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release for an AI-driven music streaming fraud scheme. The ruling, issued by federal judge John G. Koeltl in the Southern District of New York, marks the first criminal conviction of its kind involving artificially inflated streams. Between 2017 and 2024, Smith and his accomplices utilized automated bot accounts to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks on platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. To evade detection by fraud prevention systems, Smith distributed streams across hundreds of ~~hundreds of~~ thousands of tracks under fictitious artist names and used VPN services to mask the bots' locations. These accounts were registered using fraudulent email addresses and debit cards. While previous reports indicated the use of up to 10,000 simultaneous accounts, recent details specify an army of approximately 1,040 automated bot accounts was used to inflate play counts. Through this operation, Smith admitted to earning approximately $12 million, though he was ordered to forfeit approximately $8.09 million in illegal proceeds. In one notable instance in April 2023, his bot accounts generated 80.9 million streams on YouTube Music alone via family subscription packages, a figure that significantly outpaced the monthly streams of major artists; for comparison, Taylor Swift’s entire catalog recorded 9.3 million streams on the platform during that same period. Smith pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. While his defense argued the financial impact on individual artists was negligible, the Department of Justice and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) emphasized that the exploitation of new technology harmed the music community by robbing legitimate creators of revenue.

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