Musician arrested after using AI to scam streams and making $10 million

A musician accused of using artificial intelligence to create thousands of songs and creating fake copies of these tracks on streaming platforms was arrested in the United States last Wednesday (04). He made at least $10 million in royalties from the schemeequivalent to R$ 55.7 million at current prices.

The scam, which began seven years ago, involved steps such as generating songs using artificial intelligence and creating thousands of fake accounts on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music, among other platforms. Using special software, musician Michael Smith played his tracks automatically, non-stop, from multiple devices.

The allowed method is approximately 661 thousand broadcasts every day and billions of broadcasts in totalAccording to federal prosecutors, this significantly increased the scammer’s earnings. He chose strange names for the artificially created songs and their alleged authors to avoid suspicion.

according to Ars Teknik, Artist who used AI to scam audio streaming services tried to make money legally before getting involved in this schemeHowever, collaborations with other artists and the distribution of legitimate music tracks did not yield the expected results.

The entity was suspicious of the volume of songs created

The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), an organization that distributes publishing royalties, was suspicious of the sheer volume of songs recorded by Smith. It would be remarkable if the same song was played 1 billion times in a short time.A large number of songs were needed to distribute the streams among them.

Despite the artist telling the MLC that the tracks were legitimate, the investigation continued and sought to discover how the musician allegedly created so many works without any technological assistance. VPN use was also identified with keep all copies coming from your home.

According to federal prosecutors, Michael Smith faces up to 60 years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering conspiracyHe denies the accusations and claims the songs were written by humans.