A North Carolina man, Michael Smith generated songs that outstreamed Taylor Swift. His AI-assisted streaming fraud has led him to prison.

As reported in ArsTechnica (Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swift, written by Ashley Belanger and available here), Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty for using AI 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 (and covered by us here), 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. Altogether, 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.

In other words, he outstreamed Swift nearly nine to one. Not conspicuous at all. 😉

Smith’s streaming fraud didn’t just hurt platforms but genuine artists who share royalty pools on streaming services, the DOJ claimed. By cutting into that pool, Smith reduced royalties across the board. Therefore, on top of serving 18 months in prison, he must forfeit the $8,091,843.64 that he claimed through his AI scheme, the court ruled.

The DOJ fought Smith’s attempts to get probation, stating: “For years, Smith orchestrated a sophisticated fraudulent scheme that stole millions of dollars in musical royalties from rights holders”.

This may be the first case of AI-assisted streaming fraud, but I suspect it won’t be the last.

So, what do you think? Was this a “Swift” move on his part? 😉 Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using ChatGPT, using the term “several robot singers recording songs in a studio”.

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