A man in North Carolina, United States, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using AI-generated songs to inflate streaming numbers in a fraud scheme.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced that Michael Smith, 54, of North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, followed by two years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 for his involvement in music streaming fraud. He pleaded guilty on March 19, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors said that between 2017 and 2024, Smith first created thousands of fake accounts, then used software to have these bot accounts continuously play songs he owned, and used AI to generate hundreds of thousands of songs to circumvent platform anti-fraud policies, sometimes using up to 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously. These AI-generated songs were streamed billions of times, allowing him to illegally obtain more than $8 million in royalties. Prosecutors cited an example: in April 2023, Taylor Swift's entire catalog was streamed 9.3 million times on YouTube Music family plans, while in the same month, Smith's bot accounts used family plans to stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times.