North Carolina musician sentenced to 18 months for $8M AI bot-stream fraud

A North Carolina musician who flooded streaming services with plays from thousands of fake accounts has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Mike Smith, a musician from North Carolina, collected more than US$8 million in royalties, the per-play payments made by streaming platforms, through the scheme, according to Forbes.

Prosecutors said the fraud ran from 2017 to 2024. During that period Smith ran an organised network of bot accounts, software-run profiles that can play tracks on repeat, to stream his own music and AI-generated songs he had bought and uploaded, as reported by Pitchfork.

Smith pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a charge that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. As part of the plea deal, he agreed to forfeit US$8 million in streaming proceeds.

The sentence also includes two years of supervised release, a period of monitoring after prison. It was announced by Jamie McDonald, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Prosecutors had urged a sentence of at least 46 months. Smith's lawyers had argued for probation with no prison time.

The case has moved through three holders of the same federal office. Charges were first announced in September 2024 under then U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. The guilty plea in March was announced by U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton.

The Department of Justice has described the prosecution as its first criminal case over super-intelligence-assisted music streaming fraud. Smith is also the first person to face federal charges for music streaming fraud.

What makes this stand out for ordinary listeners is scale. A single stream pays only a fraction of a cent, so an operation needs a huge volume of plays to build millions in royalties. That volume is why the case centred on automation, with thousands of accounts playing large numbers of tracks around the clock, rather than on any single song.