Michael Smith of North Carolina was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit over $8 million for orchestrating a massive streaming fraud scheme. From 2017 to 2024, Smith used up to 10,000 bot accounts to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times, stealing royalty payments from legitimate artists. The landmark prosecution is the Justice Department's first criminal case involving AI-assisted music streaming fraud.
Prosecution and sentencing of Michael Smith
- ▪The case against Michael Smith was the Justice Department's first criminal prosecution involving fraud through artificial intelligence-assisted music streaming
- ▪Michael Smith pleaded guilty in March 2026 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years
- ▪Michael Smith was ordered by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to forfeit $8,091,843.64 in royalties
- ▪Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced on October 6, 2026, to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release for a music streaming fraud scheme
Creation and streaming of AI-Generated music
- ▪The artificial intelligence-generated songs owned by Michael Smith were streamed billions of times by his bot accounts between 2017 and 2024
- ▪Michael Smith used artificial intelligence to generate hundreds of thousands of songs under fake artist names like "Callous Post" and "Calorie Screams" to avoid scrutiny on any single track
Use of bot accounts to simulate streams
- ▪Michael Smith used software to simulate individual listeners tuning into his music from various locations across platforms like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music
- ▪In April 2023, Michael Smith's bot accounts generated over 80 million streams on YouTube Music family plans, compared to Taylor Swift's catalog which received 9.3 million streams on the platform
- ▪Michael Smith used up to 10,000 bot accounts, created with purchased email addresses and fraudulently obtained debit cards, to stream his music on loops
Royalty earnings and projections
- ▪By June 2019, Michael Smith was earning approximately $110,000 monthly from royalties, and he later bragged in a 2024 email of reaching $12 million in royalties since 2019
- ▪In a 2017 email, Michael Smith calculated that streaming his songs 661,440 times daily could generate $3,307.20 in daily royalties and up to $1.2 million annually
Debatable claims
- ▪Michael Smith's 18-month prison sentence for streaming fraud is too lenient
- ▪AI-generated music on streaming platforms unfairly dilutes royalties for human artists
- ▪Streaming platforms bear the primary responsibility for preventing royalty fraud
- ▪Streaming manipulation should be prosecuted as a criminal offense
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