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Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots (futurism.com)

submitted 2 months ago by Stopthatgirl7 to c/technology

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An alleged scammer has been arrested under suspicion that he used AI to create a wild number of fake bands — and fake music to go with them — and faking untold streams with more bots to earn millions in ill-gotten revenue.

In a press release, the Department of Justice announced that investigators have arrested 52-year-old North Carolina man Michael Smith, who has been charged with a purportedly seven-year scheme that involved using his real-life music skills to make more than $10 million in royalties.

Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud, the Charlotte-area man faces a maximum of 20 years per charge.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investors and share holders(see Reddit) and its all cool. Someone does that but it costs the corporation some money. Straight to jail.

Seriously, how has the reddit IPO which was offered to users not been a fraudulent scheme due to the website statistics being based on genuine user interaction with no mention of auto reposting or bots that are either operated by or hired by reddit?

It genuinely seems like the next ponzi scheme but that would require so many federal agencies that stopped giving shit and learning how the world works to see any peep into that business.

But what do I know, I'm just some average Joe that gets audited over a $300 mistake on annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.

[–] chonglibloodsport 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.

What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Spotify didn't lose a dime. Their cut is fixed.

What each play is worth is determined by how many plays there were in a month, and the income from subscribers that month.

If the "pot" is ten bucks, and people listen to a hundred songs, each artist gets ten cents for each play. If there were a thousand plays, each play is only worth one cent.

This guy didn't make money by taking it from spotify, he made it by taking it from everyone else. Spotify actually has no reason to care, and playfarming scams have been happening for years.

They only get stopped when they get big enough for the giant music labels to notice.

[–] chonglibloodsport 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How does that work though? Presumably he’s not paying subscription fees on all of his bot accounts, so they must be free accounts. I don’t use Spotify, so I don’t even know why they would have free accounts.

Unless he’s hacked other people’s accounts, then that would make sense for the seriousness of these charges.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There are various methods.

Spotify does have a free tier.

But paid accounts can rack up so many plays they can pay for themselves. If you listened to ten tracks, but someone else listened to ten thousand, then your money barely paid for what you listened to, and almost all of it went towards whatever the other user listened to a bunch.

There has also been malware that hijacks legitimate accounts... There's even been recommendation algorithm fuckery to manipulate the relevant tracks into getting recommended/autoplayed for a bunch of users.

[–] chonglibloodsport 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The whole system seems like a sham to me. If one artist has fans that listen 24/7 and another artist has fans that only listen for one hour a day (but that artist is all they listen to), it should be the same. Each person’s account should have its own “pot” out of the subscription fee that only they can allocate to the artists they listen to. Duration of listening shouldn’t matter at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I fully agree. Spotify's payment model has been criticized for years, but they refuse to consider changing it.

AFAIK youtube music works in the way you suggest, where the money from your subscription gets divided up among whoever you listen to.