X Catches Bitcoin Influencers Liking Each Other Into a £207K Payday 🪤

Elon Musk's X Internet Unlimited Company and X Corp have filed suit in the High Court of England and Wales against Bitcoin-focused account operators Vivek Kumar Sen, Zamyang Sherpa and a group of unnamed defendants, alleging they fraudulently extracted at least £207,384 (about $278,000) from the platform's former Creator Revenue Sharing initiative. The defendants are accused of coordinating accounts to publish identical or substantially similar posts, like and repost one another's content, and evade platform enforcement, producing what X described in the filing as a "false appearance of genuine, human communication and interaction." The court filing is publicly available on X's Transparency Center.

The complaint ties six enrolled accounts to the two named defendants through linked Stripe profiles. Accounts @Vivek4real_, @Bitcoin_Teddy and @saylordocs are associated with Sen via Stripe, while @TrendingBitcoin, @Kalshibacktest and @PolyBackTest are tied to Sherpa; the accounts joined the revenue program between August 2023 and February 2026. X says the network extended beyond those six, identifying @BTC_Vibes, @MrSuperBitcoin and @Laserlump as accounts that allegedly manufactured engagement by repeatedly liking, replying to and reposting the defendants' posts. The filing cites an Aug. 5 instance in which @Vivek4real_ and @TrendingBitcoin published substantially similar posts within 11 seconds of each other.

Under the now-retired Creator Revenue Sharing program, eligible creators received a share of platform revenue tied to engagement from other users. X suspended the named accounts on Aug. 18, citing creator revenue-sharing fraud and platform manipulation, then retired the program on Sept. 7 and began rolling out its replacement, Original Content Rewards, the following day. The lawsuit seeks the return of the alleged fraudulent payouts, damages, interest and legal costs, and projects an additional £75,000 (about $100,000) in investigation, analysis and remediation costs, bringing X's claimed and projected losses to at least £282,384 before interest and costs. Cointelegraph sought comment through an email address linked to Sen in the filing but had not received a response by publication, and Sherpa could not be reached.