A North Carolina man has agreed to pay over $8 million after pleading guilty in the first-ever criminal music streaming fraud case brought by law enforcement.
The feds had first indicted Mike Smith in 2024, alleging that he had used artificial intelligence music generators to help him create mass amounts of songs to be streamed millions of times by bots tied to thousands of accounts Smith had set up. Smith earned millions of dollars from his fraudulent streams, siphoning off royalties from the legitimate artists in the royalty pool.
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Smith pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Smith will also return the nearly $8.1 million he’d made.
“Smith’s brazen scheme is over, as he
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