AI-Fraudster Pleads Guilty to $8M Music Streaming Scam

0:00You're listening to Durham News Today, powered by the Daily News Now. A 54-year-old man from the Charlotte area has pleaded guilty to a massive scheme using artificial intelligence to fake billions of songs, streams and pocket over $8 million in royalties. Federal authorities say it's the first case like this in the United States. Michael Smith from Cornelius admitted to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and agreed to forfeit the money he made. His operation ran from 2017 through 2024, relying on automated bots to play AI-generated tracks nonstop across platforms, like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. By spreading the fake streams over thousands of songs, he dodged detection that might have come from focusing on just one hit. This kind of fraud hits real musicians and songwriters hard, pulling money from a shared royalty pool that should go to genuine fans' listens. Writers noted how it robbed deserving artists of earnings they worked for. Smith started small, with over 1,000 bot accounts across cloud services as early as October

1:052017, then scaled up using AI to churn. Our hundreds of thousands of fake songs. He faces up to five years in prison, with sentencing set by July 29, marking a big step and cracking down on streaming scams.