Man jailed for using 1,000 bots to fraudulently make $8m from his AI music
A man fraudulently boosted his music streams using an army of bots He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his actions He made over $8 million from the scheme across various platforms A man has received an 18-month prison sentence after he used a horde of bots to help him rake in $8 million in royalties for his AI-generated music .
He’ll have to forfeit all the money he made during his endeavor, which lasted from 2017 to 2024, but he managed to avoid a harsher punishment.
Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, uploaded hundreds of thousands of songs to streaming platforms , including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, then used over 1,000 bots to artificially inflate the listening statistics for his tracks to billions of plays.
This netted him millions of dollars based on the platforms’ per-stream payment plans.
According to TechSpot , Smith admitted to using 52 cloud service accounts that each had access to 20 bots, putting 1,040 AI agents at his disposal.
Connected to VPNs , these bots could stream roughly 636 songs per day, meaning around 661,440 daily plays for Smith.
The US Justice Department (DoJ) put the estimate even higher, saying that Smith deployed up to 10,000 bots at a time.
It added that in April 2023, Taylor Swift’s music received 9.3 million plays on YouTube Music.
Smith’s music, in contrast, was played 80.9 million times on YouTube Music in the same period.
Smith was charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy in September 2024.
He pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiring to commit wire fraud in March 2026.
He faced a sentence of up to five years’ imprisonment, but in the end was sent down for 18 months and was ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64.
He will also face two years of supervised release at the end of his sentence.
The news comes as Google has announced that it has watermarked 240,000 years’ worth of AI-generated audio and 180 billion AI images and videos using its SynthID Detector tool .
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