A man has been handed a prison sentence and ordered to repay the $8million he made from slop royalties, as the first criminal bot streaming fraud case has gone to court.
The ruling comes following a 54-year-old man from North Carolina pleading guilty to defrauding streaming services earlier this year. He managed to get $8million worth of royalties by uploading thousands of AI-generated songs to streaming platforms, then getting bots to play the songs billions of times.
In 2024 he was arrested, seven years after he started to collect royalties from the fake streams. It was also reported by the Justice Department that his AI-generated songs had over 80.9billion combined streams on YouTube Music in just one month alone. That figure is nearly 10 times higher than Taylor Swift’s stats from the same period.
It has now become the first criminal bot streaming fraud case on record, and the man has been handed down a prison sentence for 18 months – charged on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
He must also serve two years of supervised release, and is required to repay just shy of $8.1million.
Man Gets 18 Months in First U.S. AI Music Streaming Fraud Case After $8M Royalty Scheme https://t.co/u32gz3uJa1
— Law Commentary (@LawCommentary) October 8, 2026
Law Commentary reports that the man’s criminal scheme was active between 2017 and 2024, and used as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once. He also reportedly used fake email addresses and illegally obtained debit cards to create accounts on streaming services, before using software to make them repeatedly stream the AI songs he uploaded.
In other news regarding the world of AI in the music industry, last month, artists including Jason Isbell filed a lawsuit against AI platform Suno, alleging that the software allows users to copy artists’ identity and musical style without consent. In the suit, they put forward 17 claims that the AI music-creating software violated several laws regarding personal publicity rights.
Before then, Suno lost a copyright infringement lawsuit to German licensing agency GEMA, after the latter argued that Suno was using songs in its repertoire – including Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool’, Lou Bega’s ‘Mambo No. 5’, and Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ – to train its AI models, without obtaining any licenses or paying the songwriters. That ruling also meant that other AI companies must now pay to license any music from GEMA’s repertoire going forward.
There has been a significant rise in AI-generated music available online in recent years, and streaming platform Deezer recently shared that AI-generated music now surpasses 50 per cent of daily uploads on the platform – the first time that human-made music has been outnumbered by AI alternatives. Before then, a study showed that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between real and AI music.
