X has gone to court against two of its own creators. In a case filed at the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, the company accuses Bibek Kumar Sen and Jamyang Sherpa of artificially inflating engagement on their own posts — adding fake likes and replies — in order to draw money out of X's Creator Revenue Sharing programme.
What X says they did
According to the filing, the accounts the two men used were not independent at all but parts of one network. The moment a post went up on one account, the others published the same or nearly the same post and piled in with likes and replies, within seconds. Under the revenue-sharing rules a post that collects engagement earns money, so a ring of accounts boosting each other is, in effect, a machine for manufacturing payouts.
The detail that matters legally is the coordination. A creator who writes something that happens to do well is doing what the programme rewards; a creator running a set of accounts whose only job is to clap for each other is, X argues, taking money under false pretences.
The programme they gamed no longer exists
X closed the Creator Revenue Sharing programme in August and replaced it with a new rewards scheme. Under the old rules, payouts followed engagement from other users on your posts — which is precisely what made a bot-like ring of accounts profitable. The replacement shifts the weight towards a creator's own audience and away from raw interaction counts, and X has been more open about suspending accounts it believes are inflating numbers.
Why a Bangladeshi creator should care
A great many people in Bangladesh earn, or hope to earn, from platform payouts: X's rewards, YouTube's Partner Programme, Facebook's in-stream and performance bonuses, TikTok's creator funds. Around all of them sits a grey economy of engagement groups — Facebook and Telegram groups where members like and comment on each other's posts on a rota, often sold as a service for a few hundred taka a month.
Two things are worth being blunt about. First, from the platform's side there is no difference between a "support group" and the network X is suing: both are coordinated inauthentic engagement, and the detection is automated. Second, the usual penalty is not a lawsuit but something quieter and worse — demonetisation with no appeal, or a permanent suspension that takes the account and the audience with it. X going to court is unusual and expensive; that it bothered signals how seriously the platforms now treat payout fraud.
What to do instead
- Leave the engagement groups. Being in one is enough to link your account to a network you do not control.
- Do not buy likes, followers or views. The seller's other customers are the evidence trail that reaches you.
- Read the programme rules where you earn, not a summary of them on YouTube. They changed on X in August and they change regularly elsewhere.
- Keep your payout account and identity documents consistent. Most permanent bans that look like "engagement" bans are actually identity mismatches at the payment stage.
