A Vietnamese click farm is accused of duping Elon Musk’s X out of a small fortune by exploiting apparently lax controls surrounding its “Creator Revenue Sharing Program” – an initiative touted by the world’s richest person as a purported way for premium users to “earn a living” through their activity on the site.

The eight-man crew operated out of a dingy office space in downtown Hanoi, where they “programmatically post[ed] computer-generated content” to a network of “inauthentic” X profiles set up using stolen identities “to engage in coordinated platform manipulation,” according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday and obtained by The Independent.

It says these automated profiles would subsequently “‘like,’ ‘repost,’ and otherwise artificially engage with each other’s content, all for the purpose of deceiving X into paying out funds” based on what the company – which just last year enthusiastically touted a new “improved authentic engagements algorithm” – now claims were bogus clicks.

The “fraudulent scheme,” X’s complaint contends, extracted payouts from the Creator Revenue Sharing Program “by manufacturing the appearance of content engagement where none really exists.”

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Although the company’s complaint does not specify the exact amount of the outfit’s total take, it says the payments were funneled into at least 125 U.S. bank accounts, set up using stolen identities, and transferred to accounts in their real names at nine banks in Vietnam, across more than 1,700 individual transactions. The complaint was filed in Texas, where X is headquartered.

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The group also sold their automation tools and techniques, generating a separate stream of income by teaching others how to help themselves to a slice of X’s money, the complaint contends. One script, called the “XGPT Tool,” was advertised to tens of thousands of users on YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and X itself, the complaint goes on.

On top of the fraud allegations central to X’s complaint, the filing also accuses the Hanoi hackers of trademark infringement, asserting they specifically “misuse[d] and misappropriate[d] the Twitter and X Trademarks” in thumbnails for instructional videos posted to YouTube.

Broadly speaking, X’s complaint claims the alleged scam “has harmed [its] reputation and customer relationships by introducing low-quality content to the platform.”

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