GoKawiil
Tech News
Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit over $8 million after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy. Between 2017 and 2024 he used 1,040 bot accounts to generate hundreds of millions of fake streams of AI-generated songs uploaded under fictitious artist names on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube.
Michael Smith, 54, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to running a seven-year scheme that used AI-generated songs and bot accounts to defraud streaming platforms. The Justice Department said Smith created thousands of fake accounts on services like Spotify and Apple Music using stolen identities and fraudulent debit cards, then used automation to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks billions of times. In one month alone, April 2023, his fake songs reportedly generated 80.9 million streams, more than Taylor Swift's entire catalog during the same period.
Michael Smith, 54, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to running a scheme that used AI-generated songs and thousands of bot accounts to fraudulently generate billions of streams on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music between 2017 and 2024. Court documents say Smith worked with an AI music company's CEO and a music promoter, routing bot traffic through VPNs to dodge anti-fraud detection, and collected more than $10 million in royalties.