Michael Smith, a man from North Carolina, USA, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for running an extensive fraud scheme on music streaming services.
According to ITNA quoting TechSpot, he used hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks and more than a thousand streaming bots to artificially inflate play counts and collect over $8 million in royalties from music platforms.
Court documents state that Smith and his accomplices ran the scheme from 2017 to 2024 on services such as Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube. They released tracks under fake artist names and distributed the automated plays across hundreds of thousands of tracks to reduce the likelihood of detection of suspicious activity.
At its peak the network used 52 cloud service accounts, each equipped with 20 bot accounts; in total, 1,040 bots were deployed. Smith estimated that each bot could play about 636 tracks per day, resulting in the network logging more than 661,000 plays per day. The bots used virtual private networks (VPNs) to connect to the music services.
The scale of the network's activity was striking. The U.S. Department of Justice said that in April 2023 Smith's tracks had been played 80.9 million times on YouTube Music; a figure far higher than Taylor Swift's 9.3 million plays through family accounts in the same period. Those tracks streamed billions of times over several years and generated more than $8 million in revenue.
Smith was charged in September 2024 with offenses including internet fraud and money laundering and in March 2026 pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit internet fraud. In addition to serving 18 months in prison, he must repay $8,091,843.64 and serve two years of supervised release.
Another notable aspect of the case was the Department of Justice's use of the term “Super Intelligence (SI)” instead of “artificial intelligence.” This change in terminology is linked to an executive order by Donald Trump that asks government agencies to replace the term “artificial intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in official correspondence, websites, and reports.