A 54-year-old man from North Carolina has received an 18-month prison sentence and been ordered to repay nearly $8.1 million in what is reported as the first criminal bot streaming fraud case.
The man pleaded guilty earlier this year to defrauding streaming services. He generated $8 million in royalties by uploading thousands of AI-generated songs to platforms and then using bots to play them billions of times.
His criminal scheme was active between 2017 and 2024, reportedly utilising as many as 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously. He also allegedly used fake email addresses and illegally obtained debit cards to create streaming service accounts, then employed software to repeatedly stream his uploaded AI songs.
The Justice Department reported that his AI-generated songs accumulated over 80.9 billion combined streams on YouTube Music in a single month.