‘Musician’ Arrested for Using AI Songs and a Bot Army to Scam Spotify for Millions in Royalties
Is this the future of AI scamming? Michael Smith, a 52-year-old from Cornelius, North Carolina, allegedly used AI to automatically generate hundreds of thousands of songs that he then put on streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. He’s accused of using an army of bots to “listen” to the tracks that he created with no effort and likely no musical talent.
Now, Smith has been indicted for what the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the FBI called a “brazen fraud scheme.” He has been charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy.
The scheme dates back at least to 2018, when Smith partnered up with an AI music company and a music producer to mass-produce an enormous catalog of tunes. He created several fake accounts to spread the music around so it wouldn’t seem like one person suddenly could create fully produced tracks at rates faster than any known person in the history of the human race. He has a network of bots listening to them at a rate of around 661,440 streams per day.
Streaming services usually have fraud detection systems in place, but at every step of the way, Smith figured out a method of circumventing detection. For a while at least.
