Michael Smith sentenced to 18 months for wire-fraud conspiracy

On October 6, 2026, U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl sentenced Michael Smith to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The court also ordered Smith to forfeit $8,091,843.64. Smith had pleaded guilty to the charge on March 19, 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said.

The sentence and the charge

The court imposed three distinct consequences: a prison term, supervised release and a forfeiture order. The $8,091,843.64 is forfeiture, not a fine. The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Smith had fraudulently obtained more than $8 million in royalties.

How the streaming scheme worked

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the scheme ran from 2017 through 2024. Smith used fraudulent accounts and software to stream songs he owned, then collected royalties generated by those plays. Many of the songs were created with AI.

Music royalties are distributed proportionally from a pool of funds, the office said. Fraudulent streams therefore diverted royalty payments from legitimate musicians and songwriters.

The reported scale of the operation

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Smith’s accounts generated billions of streams and that he used as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once. It also said he created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs. The 10,000 figure describes the reported peak number of concurrent accounts.

The April 2023 YouTube Music comparison

For YouTube Music family-plan streams in April 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported 80.9 million streams from Smith’s bot accounts and 9.3 million for Taylor Swift’s entire catalog. That puts Smith’s accounts at about 8.7 times the catalog’s stream total for that platform, plan type and month.

What the conviction covers

Smith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The conduct described by the U.S. Attorney’s Office involved automated accounts generating streams and collecting royalties from songs Smith owned; AI-generated music was part of that scheme.