EventMusicOctober 7, 2026

AI streaming fraudster Michael Smith sentenced to 18 months

Read original source →arstechnica.com

Smith, 54, was sentenced to 18 months in prison plus two years supervised release and an $8,091,843.64 forfeiture for a scheme that ran 2017-2024. He ran up to 10,000 bot accounts streaming hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs; in April 2023 his bots logged 80.9M streams vs Taylor Swift's 9.3M.

How this story unfolded

2 weeks · 3 reports · 3 community posts · from Sep 25

  1. Sep 25
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