Michael Smith sentenced to 18 months in prison for AI music streaming fraud

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced that Michael Smith, 54, was sentenced on October 6, 2026, to 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release, and was ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 for using thousands of bot accounts on Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music to inflate streams of AI-generated songs he owned, defrauding more than $8 million in royalties. Prosecutors described the case as the first criminal prosecution by the Department of Justice of superintelligence-assisted music streaming fraud. The fraud ran from 2017 to 2024, with Smith registering bot accounts using fake emails and fraudulently obtained debit cards, using as many as 10,000 accounts at a time, and spreading traffic across thousands of songs to evade platform anomaly detection. According to the indictment, beginning in 2018 he worked with the CEO of an AI music company and a music promoter, receiving thousands of AI-generated songs each week totaling hundreds of thousands, and fabricated song titles and artist names for them.