Dexerto says the man made over $8 million from the bot-streaming scheme.
Dexerto reports that a man who used bots to stream his own AI-generated songs was sentenced to 18 months in prison. It says he made over $8 million from the scheme.
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Michael Smith was sentenced to 18 months in prison for a music-streaming fraud scheme, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced on Oct. 6. He pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Prosecutors said the scheme ran from 2017 to 2024. Smith created thousands of fraudulent streaming accounts and used software to make them continuously play music he owned that was generally created with AI. He sometimes operated as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once and spread the streams across thousands of songs to avoid detection.
The bot accounts streamed hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times, bringing in more than $8 million in royalties. Smith was also sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64.
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