A scammer has managed to sell multiple leaked Frank Ocean (an American singer, songwriter, and rapper) tracks for thousands of dollars which were not recorded by him.
According to Vice, the tracks were created using artificial intelligence (AI) and then leaked onto a vibrant community of underground music collectors for sale.
The Frank Ocean scammer goes by the handle “mourningassasin”.
The report said that the scammer hired a musician to create around nine fake Frank Ocean tracks using a model made with “very high-quality vocal snippets” of Frank Ocean’s voice.
The scammer revealed that they made around $13,000 CAD (about $9,722 in the US) from selling fake, unreleased music.
Moreover, the scammer claimed that multiple people expressed interest in private messages, offering to “pay big money for it”.
According to the report, the songs were sold for $3,000 to $4,000 each in the latter half of April. However, the user responsible for leaking them has been banned from the forum, as the rise of AI-generated music makes it increasingly effortless to produce counterfeit tracks that are almost indistinguishable from the real ones.
“This situation has put a major dent in our server’s credibility, and will result in distrust from any new and unverified seller throughout these communities,” the owner of a Discord server where the fake tracks gained traction was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, music streaming platform Spotify has removed tens of thousands of songs from artificial intelligence (AI) music startup Boomy amid complaints of fraud and clutter across streaming services.
According to the Financial Times, citing sources, the company recently took down about 7 percent of the tracks, equivalent to “tens of thousands” of songs uploaded by Boomy.
