Telha
His fraudulent scheme earned him over $10-12 million in royalties by continuously streaming songs he owned using thousands of automated bot accounts. The authorities allege that Smith collaborated with an AI music company to generate a large library of songs under fake artist names, making it appear that legitimate musicians had created them.
Partnering with an AI music company, Smith generated thousands of songs and uploaded them to streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music. Rather than relying on organic listeners, Smith orchestrated a massive bot-driven scheme, where these tracks were streamed billions of times to generate small but cumulative royalties.
To avoid detection by anti-fraud systems, Smith used a VPN and instructed his team to keep individual song streams relatively low to avoid raising suspicion. This careful manipulation resulted in approximately 4 billion fraudulent streams, netting him around $12 million.
Despite the sophistication of his operation, Smith’s deception was uncovered. He now faces charges of fraud and could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.
