Bot Bandit: The $12 Million Scam Behind AI-Generated Music’s Billions of Fake Streams
Man Accused of Scamming Music Service Out of $12 Million Using AI-Generated Music and Bots
A 52-year-old man from North Carolina has been accused of scamming a music service out of $12 million by uploading AI-generated music tracks and streaming them repeatedly using an army of over 1,000 bots.
According to court documents, Michael Smith and his co-conspirators fraudulently increased the streams of AI-generated tracks on popular music platforms, including Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube, between 2017 and 2024.
Smith’s strategy involved acquiring hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs from accomplices and streaming them relatively few times, rather than risking detection by streaming a handful of tracks millions of times using bots.
The AI-generated tracks featured artist names such as Calm Baseball, Calm Connected, Calm Knuckles, Calliope Bloom, Calliope Erratum, Callous, and Callous Humane.
Smith’s operation consisted of 52 cloud service accounts, each with 20 bot accounts, for a total of 1,040 bots. He estimated that each account accessed the platform via a VPN and was able to stream approximately 636 songs per day, resulting in 661,440 daily streams.
At a royalty rate of 0.5 cents per stream, Smith calculated that this would be a daily payout of $3,307, a monthly payout of $99,216, and a yearly payout of more than $1.2 million.
Smith claimed that his songs had been streamed more than 4 billion times and generated $12 million in royalties since 2019.
U.S. Attorney Damien Williams stated, “Through his brazen fraudulent scheme, Smith stole millions of dollars in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders of legally streamed songs.”
Smith has been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Smith will soon be arraigned before a North Carolina magistrate judge.