X is suing two men who allegedly ran a network of fake Bitcoin accounts to drain nearly $280,000 from the platform's creator fund — one platform cleaning house while the Big Tech establishment profits from the same kind of manipulation.
The lawsuit, filed in the High Court of England and Wales, names Vivek Kumar Sen and Zmyang Sherpa as operators of at least nine accounts that pumped out coordinated fake financial news to manufacture engagement and cash out. X terminated the entire network on Aug. 18 for what it called "coordinated revenue sharing fraud and platform manipulation." Now the platform wants its money back, plus damages.
The scheme was straightforward: accounts like @Vivek4real_, @Bitcoin_Teddy, and @TrendingBitcoin posted fabricated "breaking" headlines — claiming, for instance, that Goldman Sachs' CEO was pushing a crypto bill or that Citibank had bought $12.6 million in bitcoin, according to CoinDesk. The posts appeared word for word across accounts within seconds of each other. Other accounts in the network, including @BTC_Vibes, @MrSuperBitcoin, and @Laserlump, then liked, replied to, and reposted the content to create what X described as a "false appearance of genuine, human communication and interaction."
The money trail was sloppy. Stripe payment accounts tied to the first three profiles linked back to Sen, and the other three to Sherpa, Cointelegraph reported. One account's Stripe details were registered to a "Stefan Mann" while the linked bank account and email were in Sen's name — the kind of paper trail that collapses under basic scrutiny.
Sen allegedly expanded the operation by offering paid engagement manipulation services to third parties, even soliciting the purchase of high-follower accounts. In one message cited in the lawsuit, Sen reportedly wrote: "Can we continue on another channel, please, as you haven't enabled encrypted chat and I don't want us to get in trouble for something X doesn't allow. If you understand what I mean."
At stake: at least £207,384 ($278,000) in fraudulent creator payouts, plus an estimated £75,000 in investigation and remediation costs. X's Senior Legal Directors Diego de Lima Gualda and Adam Mehes signed the claim, with law firm Lewis Silkin LLP representing the platform. Neither defendant could be reached for comment.
X has since retired its revenue-sharing program entirely, replacing it on Sept. 8 with what it calls Original Content Rewards — a structural acknowledgment that the old system was gameable.
Here's the contrast that matters: X identified the fraud, terminated the accounts, and filed suit to recover the money. Meta and Google face the same bot-farm problem at vastly larger scale and have no comparable incentive to act. Bots inflate engagement metrics; engagement metrics drive ad rates; ad rates drive revenue. For Meta and Google, manipulation isn't a cost — it's a feature. The difference is ownership structure: X answers to an owner who has incentive to protect the platform's credibility. Meta and Google answer to Wall Street, which rewards inflated metrics.
The question left hanging isn't whether X can recover its money — it's whether any platform backed by public shareholders will ever have the incentive to do the same.
