A Rock Band Went Viral. Then AI Scammers Moved In
· Time
The Nashville-based rock band Sons of Legion started blowing up last year. Their yearning, anthemic, bluesy songs gained traction on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, where new fans excitedly shared their favorite lyrics and how the songs related to their own lives. The band embarked on a 50-city sold-out tour and opened for Jelly Roll.
But as the band grew more popular, McInnis began seeing his own face on social media, doing things he never did. “There were full pages of us singing different songs, asking people on dates,” he says. “The captions would say: ‘If you’re single in this area, come hang out with me.’ We could tell it was AI-generated. But in the comments, you could see that people couldn’t tell.”
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Romance scams are far from a new phenomenon. But AI tools have hypercharged them, because scammers can now deceive marks with realistic voice and video calls. “They look and sound identical to me,” McInnis says of his AI impersonators. AI scammers have in particular targeted musicians with loyal fanbases to impersonate. These days, 50 to 60 new fake online accounts pop up every day trying to extort Sons of Legion’s fans, the band’s management claims.
The scammers’ methods have succeeded in life-derailing ways. McInnis says that at every single Sons of Legion show, at least one person approaches him who believes—or once believed—that they were in a relationship with him, and had sent “him” thousands of dollars.
As McInnis fights AI scammers, he also feels like he’s fighting for human-made music itself. Sons of Legion is now competing for attention and streams against AI bands on platforms like Spotify. Amid this onslaught, McInnis hopes that music platforms will enforce stronger guardrails to stymie bad actors, and that music lovers will fight back against an AI-centric industry. “It's almost forcing everyone to decide at a certain point: Do you want to keep watching AI videos?” he says. “Or do you want something truly real?”
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Romance Scams
There are several reasons why Sons of Legion is being targeted for AI scams perhaps more so than other bands. They appeal to an older demographic that might be more susceptible to believable deepfakes. They’re an independent band, which encourages direct engagement but limits their resources to fight back. And they have a new and passionate fanbase on social media. The band exploded from 12,000 followers on Facebook in January 2025 to 2.3 million.
“Our fans are invested in us emotionally as a group. People are making friendships and meeting their lifelong partners within our fanbase,” says Daddy Jack, who is McInnis’s bandmate. “From a scammer's perspective, it's something that's very exploitable, because we're talking about honest people who wouldn't dream of scamming someone else in their lifetime.”
Scammers have targeted these fans by creating a slew of fake band pages and individual accounts. Tayler Bock, one of the band’s managers, says that his team is “constantly” trying to deactivate six or seven Facebook groups that can quickly amass over 10,000 followers, consisting of genuine fans and bot armies alike. The band’s management uses Loti, a deepfake detection startup, to track fake accounts and get them deleted. A representative for Loti says that the company has successfully triggered the removal of over 350 impersonation pages of the band. But new ones pop right back up.
A screenshot of fake Sons of Legion accounts on Facebook. —Adam McInnisMeta users are prohibited from impersonating others, according to the company’s policies. A Meta spokesperson told TIME that the company was investigating Sons of Legion scammers and taking action against violating assets. They also pointed to new efforts using AI to fight scammers.
Once a fan joins a fake group—or the band’s real one—scammers swarm them with messages from accounts purporting to be McInnis or Daddy Jack. The scammers then take them to another more secure messaging platform—whether it be Zangi, Telegram, or Signal—and in a few days, start sending romantic AI-generated voice messages, photos, or videos, sometimes of McInnis getting into the shower. “I've seen them, and I'm like, ‘Yeah, that looks like me. It looks like my body,’” McInnis says.
These messages lead fans to believe they’re in a relationship with McInnis. So when the scammer asks them for thousands of dollars via cryptocurrency—whether to pay for tour expenses or hospital bills—they comply. McInnis says that the band’s choice to remain independent has given scammers a convenient excuse to ask for money from fans. “We have a lot of fans who understand that we’re taking a different direction. So when we reach out and say, ‘Can you give us a little bit of money,’ they want to support us,” he says.
Scammers also have been selling fake merchandise, concert tickets, and “membership cards” for backstage passes. Bock says women routinely try to get past security at concerts by flashing fake credentials. At every meet-and-greet, women come up to McInnis believing they’re in a relationship. One person emailed McInnis saying their friend left a 40-year marriage to a fake Adam and gave them $50,000. In other instances, women send back nude photographs after AI Adam has sent them illicit photos, which leads scammers to “sextort” them.
The deluge of messages is making Sons of Legion’s true fans more reluctant to engage with the group online—which then hurts the band in the eyes of the algorithm. “I’m on my 14th ‘Adam’ over the past month,” wrote another fan. “They ask for money (cards) and try to convince you that they ‘love’ you and want to marry you and sometimes it turns to sexting.”
Luke Arrigoni, the founder and CEO of the deepfake detection startup Loti, estimates that Sons of Legion is in the top 10% in terms of scam volume. Loti scans the internet and issues takedown requests to social media platforms based on the right of publicity, which protects one’s own likeness, and the Lanham Act, which prevents false advertising. Sons of Legion is also shielded by Tennessee’s AI-focused ELVIS Act, which was passed in 2024 and protects against the unauthorized use of one’s voice, image, or likeness.
Arrigoni says that after a while, Sons of Legion’s scammers will get tired of creating new accounts for the band, and move onto impersonating a new band that doesn’t pay for protection services. “We’re playing whack-a-mole at an industrial level,” he says.
AI’s impact on other music income
McInnis says his fans are getting wiser to romance scams, especially as they swap horror stories at live shows. But AI is still creeping into other parts of his career. That includes Spotify, which remains a hugely important platform for artists to be discovered. McInnis claims that Spotify has increasingly directed listeners toward AI-generated acts rather than human musicians, which can release songs more quickly and at a much lower cost.
The recommended artists on Sons of Legion’s Spotify page all have similar vibes at first glance: Their profile pictures show rugged men in cowboy hats staring moodily into the distance. But most of them—including Aventhis, Breaking Rust, Doc Raven, and Cain Walker—are AI.
AI bands suggested to Sons of Legion fans on Spotify.McInnis says that a friend recently FaceTimed him from Costa Rica, telling him that they were listening to Sons of Legion. But when McInnis heard the song, it wasn’t his band, but rather an AI band that had autoplayed on Spotify after one of Sons of Legion’s actual songs—and sounded very similar to them.
McInnis fears that the AI slop problem on Spotify will only get worse. “The goal for any company is ad revenue and retention time. If fans say, ‘we don't want AI, they'll have to take it down,” he says. “But because fans aren't saying that, they're going to keep it going. And over the next two years, we’ll get to the point where the average person will not know what’s real—and some won’t care, depending on their age.”
A Spotify spokesperson wrote to TIME in an email that the company’s “focus is on helping fans discover more of what they love while protecting the platform against spam, impersonation, and deception.” They added that the company has rolled out tools like Verified by Spotify and AI credits to give listeners more information about musicians and the role AI played in the music-making process.
At the moment, Sons of Legion is still thriving musically, propelled by raucous concerts that have drawn packed houses across the continent. But McInnis is frustrated by having to fight AI slop at every turn. And he worries that the corporations that run the music industry aren’t doing enough to protect independent musicians from AI’s onslaught, threatening their ability to make a sustainable living.
“We are doing everything that we can do as individuals,” he says. “But the platforms are the ones who have to crack down on this stuff. And they're not going to do that unless they either have users leaving or they're getting less money.”