alt Hacker NewsUS man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams
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Here’s what bothers me: isn’t the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered? It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal—but if a major corporation does it, they just get a slap on the wrist.
> “Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said US Attorney Jamie McDonald.
Super intelligence. Aha. :)
If you pay for a $15/month service, how are you able to make more then $15/month in royalties?
When has any Facebook executive ever gotten a prison sentence for their horrendous doings? They just pirated all of Anna's Archive to feed into their AI.
Our legal system has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.
I am not sure I understand. Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"? Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
> By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud.
He certainly didn’t defraud artists or their fans. This is false framing. He defrauded the streaming platform, which I’m sure the jury would be far less empathetic towards.
If Spotify royalties were allocated fairly a scheme like this shouldn't be able to pull more money out than the subscriptions put in.
Oh lord. “Super Intelligence”
So the agencies are forced to pretend every ridiculous thing their king says is a great idea.
> At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts
I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.
These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.
The part saying he robbed streams from legitimate artists and fans is quite stupid but expected in a case like this.
Interesting. The site uses term super intelligence, BUT is used to spread negative portrayal of AI tech.
The AI is incidental to the story. The fraud is the fake streams for money.
"Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smith’s bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times."
what always fascinates me about crime like this is, if this guy hadn't tried to make 8 million dollars with 10k bot accounts and boosted himself straight to the top, he could have easily made a few thousand per month. How are people clever enough to set this scheme up to begin with but don't consider that you maybe shouldn't try to alert the entire fraud department
Sam Altman is hiding tons of evidence of OpenAI's crimes. DOJ please investigate
the crime isnt the AI music its the fake views isnt it? i hate how the titles are being framed here
Now do they go after ad click farms?
I wonder if he would have gotten away with it if only he had stayed under well the radar.
A digital society takes the value out of a place. There was a time when, if you did not Show Up, you were always alone.
> SMITH pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
I need this guy’s lawyer
Imagine showing this headline to someone in the 80s or before.
Part of this does seem objectionable. But uhh, the other half, yikes. Superintelligence: ok for capital, not allowed for individuals.
> "Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud."
Wow, uh, he had a time machine?
> Smith’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024
Won't somebody please think of the artists? /s
People here in HN seem to believe that royalty collecting companies are some sort of charitable organizations for the benefit of the artists. But their conduct and practices range from questionable [1] to outright fraudulent [2]. And now they manage to fly below the radar, because everyone (artists included) is busy bashing Spotify. These companies would sue Spotify out of existence had they offered the option to directly pay the artists instead of going through them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1302np/jasrac_this_i...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/huge-scandal-engulfs-greek-anti-pir...
Feels like this is missing the bigger story, that this guy was using ai (AI!) to generate music in 2017-2024! /s
Genuine question: what if my agents produce better output if I stream audio to them while they work? Is that fraud?
Feels like some kind of sentence to make an example of someone to scare off other people ala going after grandmas for napster. There's way too much of this going on on instagram and tiktok etc etc already. They went after this guy but is letting many people get away with it.
After talking at length with claude about this case it seems that while botting music streams does meet the bar for wire fraud, creating thousands of fake accounts on walmart to scalp pokemon cards does not. In my opinion these are the same thing, one just pays out from a shared royalty pool and the other on ebay. I guess that's a big difference from a legal perspective, but from a moral and technical perspective they're the same thing. Michael could have applied the same skills and made millions of dollars flipping GPU's and sneakers without any legal consequences. I'm not sure what the takeaway here is but something about this doesn't feel just to me.