The US Department of Justice said Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 for using AI-generated songs and automated bot accounts to fraudulently collect streaming royalties. Prosecutors said he and co-conspirators uploaded hundreds of thousands of AI-made tracks between 2017 and 2024, using fake emails, fraudulently obtained debit cards, VPNs and playback software to generate billions of plays on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. The DOJ called it its first prosecution of AI-assisted music streaming fraud; the court noted that in April 2023 his tracks drew 80.9 million YouTube Music family-plan streams, versus 9.3 million for Taylor Swift's entire catalog that month.