Man who made $8 million in AI streaming fraud scheme given 18-month prison sentence

Michael Smith – the North Carolina man who was found guilty of a scheme to use bots listening to his AI-generated music to generate $8 million in streaming revenue – has been given an 18-month prison sentence.

Smith was charged by US federal prosecutors in 2024, when it was revealed his ploy began as far back as 2017. According to the Department of Justice, he created thousands of bot accounts across streaming platforms – including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music – and used software to make the bots continuously stream “hundreds of thousands” of AI-generated tracks he had made.

Smith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in March, and agreed to pay $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture. It is estimated that Smith made around $14 million from the scheme over a period of multiple years.

Last week, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York revealed that Smith had been given an 18-month prison sentence.

“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud by flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans,” US Attorney Jamie McDonald said following the sentencing [via Mixmag].

Following the sentencing, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) added: “This result sends a clear message that streaming fraud is a crime and has serious consequences. But enforcement is only one part of tackling streaming fraud – we also need to prevent, detect and disrupt fraudulent activity.”

“The global music industry is collectively doing just that through the Streaming Integrity Initiative which protects artists, rightsholders and fans and strengthens trust in streaming.”

In other AI news, Suno users turned their back en masse on the AI music generator platform following its v6 update last month. The update came after Suno came clean about its use of audio data taken from YouTube to train its models.

Sam is the Associate News Editor for Guitar.com and MusicTech. Thoroughly immersed in music culture for the majority of his life, Sam has played guitar for 20 years, studied music technology and production at university, and also written for the likes of MusicRadar, Guitar World, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer.