It is a scheme just as genius as it is criminal: a musician leveraged AI technology to pull in millions from Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music by unleashing an army of fake bots to stream his synthetic tracks and generate massive illicit payouts.
Michael Smith has now etched his name into the legal history books as the first person in the United States to face prison time after being convicted of AI-assisted music streaming fraud.
Smith’s intricate operation involved churning out hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and deploying a vast, automated network of bots to stream them continuously—translating synthetic listens directly into cold, hard cash.
Because music streaming platforms pay out royalties every time a track is played, an artist's potential earnings are directly tied to their stream counts: the higher the play count, the larger the payout.
U.S. DOJ Exposes Massive Music Streaming Fraud by Michael Smith Using 10,000 Bots
“Michael Smith exploited technology to commit fraud,” declared U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in place of real listeners and fake songs in place of authentic creativity, Smith stole millions in royalty payments meant for genuine artists. This office remains committed to protecting public markets from those who use technology to defraud others.”
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Smith intentionally spread his automated streams across thousands of different tracks to avoid triggering platform algorithms that flag suspicious spikes on individual songs. At the height of his scheme, Smith operated up to 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously—setting them up using fraudulent debit cards and disposable email addresses to keep the phantom streams flowing undetected.
According to the department, in April 2023, the entire catalogue of Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams, while in the same month, Smith’s Bot Accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times.