Man jailed 18 months for $8M streaming fraud with 1,000 AI-music bots

Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for wire fraud after using over 1,000 bots to inflate streams of his AI-generated music on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. He must forfeit $8,091,843.64 earned from the scheme between 2017 and 2024.

• Smith ran 52 cloud accounts with 20 bots each, totaling 1,040 bots
• The bot network generated roughly 661,440 plays per day via VPNs
• The DoJ estimated he deployed up to 10,000 bots at once
• Sentence: 18 months in prison and forfeiture of $8,091,843.64