GoKawiilNorth Carolina man gets 18 months for AI music streaming fraud scheme
Michael Smith, 54, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $8 million after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy. Prosecutors say he created up to 10,000 fake accounts to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times between 2017 and his 2024 arrest, spreading plays across many tracks to avoid detection. In one example cited by the Justice Department, his bots generated 80.9 million fraudulent family-plan streams in April 2023, compared with 9.3 million for Taylor Swift's entire catalogue that month.