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.
sleen@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Government when the elites use loopholes and do devious shit:
Government when the peasants use loopholes:
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
TBF, this particular loophole doesn’t take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.
And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
GluWu@lemm.ee 2 months ago
So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investorsand 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 fraudulently 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 ony annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.
overload@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Agreed. As a person that has released music, I hate this guy and would like the book thrown at him and anyone mass releasing shitty AI music… It might not be a big corpo doing it, but it’s still fucking creatives over.
0x0@programming.dev 2 months ago
I’m sorry but it’s the 21st century, even small indie artists can have their own sites nowadays or, heck, use bandcamp, sellaband… you can’t really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.