How prosecutors say up to 10,000 bots inflated AI-song streams

How did the bot accounts inflate the streams?

The Justice Department says Smith created thousands of accounts, then used software to play songs he owned and collect royalties tied to those plays. The department says he used fake email accounts and fraudulently obtained debit cards to set up accounts.

Smith’s operation used as many as 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously, according to prosecutors. They say he spread streams across thousands of songs to make the activity less likely to be detected. The accounts generated repeated plays rather than reflecting ordinary listening by consumers.

A large catalogue of tracks helped sustain that volume, prosecutors say. The Justice Department says Smith generated hundreds of thousands of AI-made songs, and that the bot accounts played hundreds of thousands of tracks billions of times.

That description makes AI-generated music part of the alleged scheme’s scale, not the offense itself. The admitted crime was a conspiracy to commit wire fraud through fabricated streams and royalty payments. The case does not establish that AI-generated tracks are inherently fraudulent or that uploading them to a streaming service is illegal.

How did fake plays affect royalties?

The Justice Department describes streaming royalties as being distributed proportionately from pools of money. Under that system, the department says, artificially generated plays can redirect payments from music listened to by real audiences.

Prosecutors cited a comparison from April 2023: Smith’s accounts generated 80.9 million YouTube Music streams through family plans that month, they said, while Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue received 9.3 million streams through those plans. Those are the government’s figures; the available reporting does not provide an independent audit of the totals.

The Justice Department says Smith fraudulently obtained more than $8 million in royalties, and the court ordered him to forfeit $8,091,843.64. The case materials described in the reporting do not independently show how any diverted payments were distributed among individual artists or rights holders. The scale of the claimed activity should not be mistaken for an independently measured loss to a particular musician.

Jamie McDonald, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, described the alleged harm in remarks reported by Tom’s Hardware: “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans”. That is the prosecutor’s characterization of the case, not an independent assessment of what any individual artist lost.

What does Smith’s sentence establish about enforcement?

Smith pleaded guilty on March 19, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. His sentence, supervised release and forfeiture order show the consequences imposed in this prosecution for a scheme involving fabricated streaming activity and royalties.

They do not establish a standard penalty for future cases. The outcome cannot show how often authorities will pursue similar conduct or what sentence another defendant might receive. Nor does it determine how enforcement would apply to other conduct involving AI-generated music.

The sentencing account also does not independently evaluate streaming platforms’ anti-fraud safeguards or establish how they detected Smith’s activity. The government’s description explains how the accounts were used and gives figures for the streams and royalties, but the reporting does not supply an outside audit of those totals.

The central distinction is between making tracks and falsifying their audience to collect payments. Smith admitted the wire-fraud conspiracy, and the court imposed prison time and forfeiture. Whether the reported stream totals and financial calculations can be independently verified remains unresolved in the available reporting.