In the first case of its kind in the country, a Charlotte-area man is charged with using AI to manipulate music streaming platforms to siphon off over $10 million in royalties, federal authorities said Wednesday.
Michael Smith, 52, of Cornelius, was arrested Wednesday and is charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said in a news release.
Each charge carries up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Smith’s complex scheme used automated programs, or “bots,” to stream songs created with artificial intelligence, according to an indictment released Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI’s New York Field Office.
He then used the bot accounts to stream those songs billions of times across multiple streaming platforms to boost his royalties to over $10 million, according to the indictment.
Pavel Durov (lead image) aka Paul du Rove (“vagabond” in French) doesn’t put his money where his mouth is.
This is because more than half the assets and almost half the revenues of Durov’s Telegram group of companies are digital units which Telegram itself programmes, stores, trades, values, and revalues, so the potential for concealment, deception and fraud is unaccountably large. This is the reason Durov has failed to secure the US regulator’s permission to sell shares in his $30 billion valuation of Telegram in a US initial public offering (IPO). In short, the freedom and privacy Durov claims his Telegram social media platform represents is not at all what the financial reports reveal of his money-making.
The first fraud flag was waved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in October 2019 after more than a year of Durov’s money-raising through digital tokens he called Grams which he offered to sell for $1.5 billion. At the time, cornerstone investors in Durov included the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and other oligarchs.
Durov — announced the SEC — “seeks to obtain the benefits of a public offering without complying with the long-established disclosure responsibilities designed to protect the investing public… the defendants have failed to provide investors with information regarding Grams and Telegram’s business operations, financial condition, risk factors, and management that the securities laws require.”
In the five years since then, Durov claims to have sold another billion-dollar bond in 2021; $210 million in fresh securities in 2023; and $330 million in paper which Durov floated in March of this year. “The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization”, he said (telegrammed) at the time.
These investments weren’t exactly money for value, or vice versa. Durov has admitted he has been buying about a quarter of the debt issues himself. “Valuations are based on market inputs that are not observable,” reported a blockchain industry analyst.
This is the first mainstream news article I have seen that admits the rise in cancers coincides with the covid vax rollout. The ‘culprit doctors fear’ is, conveniently, covid itself. Readers of this site are well aware of the mounds of evidence pointing to the covid vaxxes shutting down natural immunity while also infusing the body with lipid nanoparticles and uncontrollable spike proteins. ABN
In a shocking development, a juror was dismissed Monday morning after a woman showed up at her house on Sunday, offering a bag containing $120,000 in cash and promising a second bag if the juror voted to acquit the Islamic defendants involved in the largest U.S. pandemic-era fraud scheme.
In a dramatic and alarming development, a juror in the Feeding Our Future federal fraud trial was abruptly dismissed. This case, being actively suppressed by mainstream media, took a shocking turn when a woman arrived at the juror’s home on Sunday. The woman offered a bag containing $120,000 in cash and promised a second bag if the juror voted to acquit the defendants.
After it was revealed that Attorney General Merrick Garland, the FBI and DOJ added language to their search warrant permitting the FBI to use deadly force against President Trump and/or his security detail during the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, President Trump responded with shock.
Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion to amend the bail conditions for President Trump on Friday night. Prosecutor Smith wants Judge Cannon to forbid President Trump from talking about the FBI agents who conducted the armed raid and used the search warrant. [PDF Court Motion Here]
There is a profound irony in Jack Smith seeking to block President Trump from talking about the FBI conduct, as the former president’s remarks might create “misleading impressions” about the details of the raid. The DOJ and FBI have been leaking “misleading impressions” to the media for almost 9 years about the FBI operation investigation of Donald Trump.
For nine years, more than 40 highly political assigned FBI agents have been fabricating stories and leaking them to the media; yet, it is President Trump who the DOJ worries might create “misleading impressions.” The issue would be farcical if the lying FBI topic was not so serious.
Representative Harriet Hageman used the opportunity of the House Weaponization Committee hearing, on the Lawfare trial of Donald Trump in New York, to outline Rep. Dan Goldman’s (D-NY) conflict of interest.
Goldman has hired Judge Merchan’s daughter – a clear conflict of interest. Additionally, Goldman has admitted to coaching Trump witness Michael Cohen prior to his testimony. Harriet Hageman outlined the details of the issue, while Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) claimed an immediate point of order in order to hide the information. WATCH:
During the same committee hearing, Hageman also outlined the larger Lawfare attack as constructed by Judge Merchan to assist the Lawfare goals.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it: the concept of the energy transition is essentially a Western conceit. The U.S. and Western European countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Energiewende to fund buildouts of solar, wind, batteries, and tutti-fruity-colored hydrogen, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will do the same. There is no evidence that China and India are going through an energy transition. Instead, the numbers show those two countries are building staggering amounts of new coal-fired capacity. That capacity is far greater than the amount of nuclear capacity they are building. This chart, which I first published last December, uses updated figures from the International Energy Agency and Global Energy Monitor.
Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly will not face charges again after a jury failed to reach a verdict in his murder case and the judge declared a mistrial.
Kelly, 75, was charged in connection to the fatal shooting of Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, an unarmed migrant, on his property near the U.S.-Mexico border. Kelly faced second-degree murder and aggravated assault charges related to the Jan. 30, 2023, killing.
1. The George A. Kelly case is worse than you think. Departments we depend on to protect us, went out of their way to prosecute George based on the hand crafted “testimony” from a twice convicted foreign gun runner… and it only gets worse from there.
UPDATE: Major Black Pill. I already am black-pilled and believe all we can do is maybe sometimes achieve anarchic resistance to excessive authoritarianism. Basically, kings & queens are back or never left. A friend explained that Webb and many of the people she speaks with online are anti-statist, against nation states, libertarian, anarchic. I don’t know enough about Webb and her circle to say, nor do I know if my friend is right. But it does seem that something like that is so.
I appreciate Webb and Goodwin’s detailed breakdown and analysis of who is doing what, how and why. It’s definitely worth listening to.
To readers who are royalists or want to return to traditional empires, that’s where we are now. We are inside an empire right now and it is growing, going for world domination. I for one do not see any way we can change the composition of world or regional power elites. Those people have wealth and connections that no mass of people can ever muster. Elections are clearly rigged, like everything else. Going off grid or putting your money in a local bank or gold appear to be futile. I plan to have fun and recognize all of the above proves the First Noble Truth, which is good if that’s what you perceive in all this. ABN
Filing this one under ‘fraud’ and ‘Americana’. Note the bottom scientism deception: Inspired by ongoing research at… Note also the heavy messianic implication of the image. This is an actual advertisement in the mail. Sent by a friend. As we marvel at the craziness of this, compare to the rollout of ‘safe & effective’ vaxxes which had never been tested or the heavy coercion that you take them, a clear fact now denied by main perps. ABN
American Buddhist Net 