Man uses 10,000 bots to fraudulently earn $8 mn from AI music, goes to jail

Michael Smith, a 54-year-old man, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using AI-generated music and bots to fraudulently earn over $8 million in streaming royalties. From 2017 to 2024, he operated nearly 10,000 bots, spreading fake streams across thousands of songs to evade anti-fraud systems. In April 2023, his bots generated 80.9 million fraudulent YouTube Music family-plan streams.