X Sues Two Bitcoin Influencers Over Bot Army That Milked Creator Payouts

X is taking two men to the High Court in London, claiming they ran a coordinated bot network that siphoned £207,384 ($278,000) from the platform’s Creator Revenue Sharing program. The complaint, filed on September 17 under claim number BL-2026-001161, names Vivek Kumar Sen and Zamyang Sherpa as operators of six enrolled accounts and at least three booster accounts designed to fake engagement on Bitcoin-related content (source: court filing).

The lawsuit outlines a modus operandi involving the posting of near-identical Bitcoin charts and copy seconds apart to artificially meet payout thresholds. To qualify for Creator Revenue Sharing, which launched in July 2023, accounts needed an X Premium subscription, 500 verified followers, and five million impressions over a three-month period (source: filing). X alleges the network obscured the scheme using Stripe accounts registered under mismatched names, with one payment profile linked to Sen despite listing a different identity.

James Burnham, general counsel for X and xAI, confirmed the filing in a Sunday post: “We do not tolerate fraudulent behavior on X—and will act forcefully to protect our platform and the earnings of genuine creators” (source: X post by Burnham). The company suspended all nine accounts on August 18, two weeks before terminating Creator Revenue Sharing on September 7, 2026, and replacing it with Original Content Rewards, a program that excludes artificially generated engagement from payouts (source: filing).

Decrypt reports that X sued Vivek Kumar Sen, Zamyang Sherpa, and unnamed others in London's High Court on September 17, alleging "a bot network stole at least £207,384 ($278,000) from Creator Revenue Sharing." This action follows a 2025 lawsuit against a bribery network linked to banned crypto-scam accounts, marking X’s second major legal push against platform abuse (source: Decrypt). The case is early in its procedural life, with no defense filed as of September 21 (source: court records). For those monitoring the intersection of crypto regulation and platform policy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases CPI data on October 14, 2026, and the Federal Reserve decides on rates on October 28, 2026 (source: BLS, Federal Reserve).