The end for the man who used AI and 1,000 bots to siphon off $8 million in music royalties.

Instead of creating art, Michael Smith chose a "wicked" path, turning artificial intelligence and simulation tools into a transnational money-making machine. After seven years of secretly outsmarting giants like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, the 52-year-old "super scammer" finally pleaded guilty and faced a prison sentence and a huge fine.

This large-scale fraud began in 2017, when Smith and his accomplices deployed an extremely sophisticated tactic to profit from royalties. Instead of concentrating millions of listens on a few specific songs—which would be easily detected by anti-fraud systems—Smith chose a "divide and conquer" strategy. He used AI to produce hundreds of thousands of soulless songs under the names of "meaningless" artists like Calm Baseball or Calliope Bloom , then distributed the playback to them in small, scattered numbers to create the illusion of being completely natural.

To operate this "empire" of trash music, Smith mobilized an army of over 1,000 bots running continuously across 52 cloud service accounts via VPN. With meticulous calculations, each bot account could stream approximately 636 songs per day, helping the system achieve over 660,000 daily listens globally. Based on average royalty fees, he consistently pocketed over $3,300 per day, equivalent to about $1.2 million per year, without expending a single drop of creative effort.

Despite boasting in emails that the system had generated $12 million, the actual amount Smith embezzled was over $8 million, according to the US Department of Justice's investigation. US Attorney Jay Clayton emphasized: "Although the songs and listeners were fake, the money Smith stole from the pockets of artists and copyright owners was real." This serves as a stark warning against the burgeoning AI-powered fraud in the entertainment industry.

The price for this "hoax of the century" is a prison sentence of up to five years, expected to be handed down at the end of July. Simultaneously, Smith has also agreed to pay a fine of over $8 million to compensate for the damages he caused. The case once again raises concerns about the explosion of AI-powered music creation services like Suno —which is producing up to 7 million songs per day—posing a risk of online platforms being overwhelmed by spam content and fake view-farming tactics.