The Grandmaster of the Hair-Pulling World, $1 Million in Hand

Spotify is a global streaming music platform. After users pay for a subscription, they can listen to music anytime, and the platform distributes revenue to creators based on the number of plays. As long as a song is listened to for 30 seconds, it will generate earnings.
He took advantage of this rule and uploaded 467 songs in one go, with each one just barely exceeding 30 seconds.
Then he started to ramp up: he bought 1,200 Spotify paid accounts, set all of them to loop his own playlists for 24 hours a day, and the rest was just lying back and waiting for the money to roll in.
With these 1,200 accounts, he could generate 72 million plays per month—corresponding to royalties of more than $400,000—while his cost was only $12,000 per month in membership fees.
The playlist names were designed to follow an emotional route: “Soul’s Voice” and “Music from the Heart.”
Even more outrageous, these two playlists directly surged into the global charts—“Soul’s Voice” reached as high as No. 11 in the US, overtopping a pile of major-label playlists.
Throughout the whole process, these abnormal data points were actually sitting in Spotify’s weekly revenue reports, and were sent to the record labels every week, but for months nobody paid them any attention.
The most unbelievable part is that this whole operation was right on the edge of the rules; it didn’t directly break the law.
The accounts were bought with real money, the plays came from real paid accounts, and the music uploads also had proper copyrights.
Later, when reporters went to ask Spotify whether this counted as fraud, the company wasn’t even willing to offer that characterization.
The reason he got caught was also simple: he made too much money. After he broke into the top 50, big executives at major companies noticed the data, and only then did the whole thing get exposed.
By October 2017, when Spotify took down these songs, he had already put $1 million into his pocket.
A few years later, in the US, a person named Michael Smith followed and amplified this same approach.
He used AI to generate music in bulk, and paired it with 10,000 robot accounts.
In the end, he刷ed out $10 million in royalties.
But in order to maintain this system, he began buying emails in bulk, registering accounts with fake identities. When the platform questioned him, he lied straight out, and he even used a company debit card to disguise the payments.
These actions pushed the case directly into the realm of telecommunications fraud.
In 2024, the US Department of Justice moved in. He pleaded guilty and was forced to refund $8 million.
With the same kind of play, if the details deviated even a bit, the outcomes diverged.
One person made the money and walked away; another is waiting for sentencing.