In March we covered the legal outcome of Michael Smith’s fraudulent streaming escapades. He was accused of fraudulently streaming AI-created songs and dishonestly collecting royalties. Now we learn of his sentence: 18 months in federal prison.
“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “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.”
The victorious prosecutors call this the first-ever criminal prosecution for AI-assisted streaming fraud. Smith is ordered to pay back $8.09 million. Furthermore, he will spend two years in “supervised release,” a type of punitive monitoring and restricted freedom.
Smith conducted his illegal activities for about seven years between 2017 and 2024. The scope of his fraudulent operation is both heinous and impressive:
“Hundreds of thousands of AI-created songs.” (That’s not a typo.)
10,000 automated bot accounts, seemingly legitimized using fraudulently obtained debit cards and fake email addresses.
Carefully spreading automated streams across thousands of music tracks, his scheme evaded detection for seven years and generated billions of non-human plays. The scale of this gambit reportedly generated more YouTube Music streams than Taylor Swift’s entire catalog during one measured time period.
Smith pleaded guilty.
