An indictment has been unsealed charging Michael Smith from North Carolina with a $10 million streaming scam that employed automated bots to stream AI-Generated songs.
$10 Million Dollar Streaming Scam
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The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York identified Michael Smith as the individual facing wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy counts. Authorities allege Smith set up “thousands of Bot Accounts” on streaming platforms and automated them to “continuously stream songs that he owned” to generate royalties for him to pocket. To generate enough tracks to make the scheme viable, Smith “eventually turned to artificial intelligence,” the attorney’s office alleged. The AI-generated songs, obtained through an AI music company CEO and a music promoter, contained song and artist names that Smith purportedly “randomly generated” to give the false impression they had been made by actual musicians, according to the attorney’s office.
Authorities allege Smith set up “thousands of Bot Accounts” on streaming platforms and automated them to “continuously stream songs that he owned”
The attorney’s office contends the royalties that Smith accummilated in from his accounts streamed “hundreds of thousands” of his AI-generated songs “billions of times” amounted to over $10 million in royalties from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music.
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Christie Curtis, FBI Acting Director, stated “the defendant’s alleged scheme played upon the integrity of the music industry by a concerted attempt to circumvent the streaming platforms’ policies.”
