US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams

A North Carolina man, Michael Smith, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for operating a bot-farming scheme that generated over $8 million in fraudulent royalties from AI-generated songs streamed through fake accounts between 2017 and 2024. Smith created approximately 10,000 fraudulent accounts to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times, distributing streams across multiple songs to avoid detection, and has been ordered to forfeit all $8 million in illegally earned royalties.