A man scams more than $10 million with a truly dystopian concept: machines entertain machines through machines.
How can someone earn so much money when no one listens to the music? Strictly speaking, “someone” did listen to the music, just not a human. The 52-year-old defendant has after extensive notification by the U.S. Justice Department built a high-tech network for streaming fraud.
This was made possible by bots that stream the music and AIs that created the music beforehand. The only human touch was uploading the tracks to platforms like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music.
So machines created music to entertain machines via streaming over machines (the Internet).
1,000 bots for billions of streams of countless songs
How did he exactly proceed? Together with accomplices, the defendant from North Carolina implemented the following procedure:
- His helpers created short music pieces using AI – several hundred thousand.
- He uploaded these under alphabetically ordered but nonsensical titles like
Zygotic
by artists likeCalvin Mann
orZyme Bedewing
byCalypso Xored
. - Then he had the songs streamed continuously by more than 1,000 bots, running on 52 different cloud services, over a VPN network.
- For this, he created an appropriate number of bot accounts in violation of the platforms’ terms of service.
Ultimately, since 2019, four billion streams were generated by the bots. Overall, the defendant stole about $10 million in royalties.
Why wasn’t this discovered earlier? The prosecution accuses him of knowing exactly what to watch for. He not only diversified the streams over more than 1,000 bots, but also distributed their countless views across thousands of songs. Thus, his actions remained undetected for a long time. The authorities possess emails discussing this approach.
What awaits him? The prosecution charges him with the following offenses:
- Conspiracy to commit Internet fraud
- Internet fraud
- Conspiracy to commit money laundering
For each offense, he can be sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison. According to U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, he now has to answer for his offenses or as it aptly puts in English:
It’s time for […] him ‘to face the music.’
Why is this illegal? The defendant didn’t steal anything, did he? At first glance, this perspective may seem correct, but one quickly falls into an error. For the money he received from Amazon and Co. could no longer be paid to artists who offer their works for streaming. Especially the creation of the bot accounts is illegal and constitutes fraud.
Completely different, but still thematically related, looks the following alleged fraud, which in Turkey is subject to unexpectedly draconian penalties. What a candidate for a university career allegedly attempted during a state examination will likely follow him for a lifetime: For his cheating attempt with a camera, mobile phone, and AI failed, yet the police are apparently quite impressed.
