A federal judge in the United States sentenced a 21-year-old Nigerian stock trader to prison after he admitted to using artificial intelligence to generate thousands of fake courtroom melodramas for X, earning hundreds of dollars per week from the platform’s revenue-sharing scheme.
The mechanics of the scam
The story began with a thread in X that appeared in my feed. A narrator claimed to be a mother facing federal charges for embezzlement. Her nine-year-old son walked into the courtroom, identified the fraudsters in the room, and secured her release.
The author of that thread was not a mother. He was a self-identified trader in Nigeria. He used AI to write the story and collected payment from X under its Creative Revenue Sharing program.
I noticed the pattern when I started clicking on these compact tales of redemption. The algorithm responded by feeding me more. The program pays creators whose posts boost engagement. To qualify, a user must be a Premium subscriber, hold at least 500 verified followers, and generate a minimum of 5 million impressions in a three-month window.
X states the goal is to encourage authentic, high-quality content. Some money does go to creators making that kind of material. But paying for viral posts makes the system ripe for exploitation.
Some participants engage in rage baiting, using outrageous material to draw comments and views. In May 2025, X sued eight Vietnamese creators and 25 John Does. The company alleged they defrauded the program by posting fake AI-generated content and boosting engagement with bot-driven comments.
In April, X moved to cut payments for aggregators who primarily reposted news from other sources. The platform also threatened sanctions against those who overused the BREAKING tag to draw eyeballs. On July 16 of this year, X revealed it had removed millions of posts that stole already-published content.
How the stories are built
Rob Cover, a professor at Australia’s RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre who studies AI-generated content, broke down the structure for me. It is as formalised as a sonnet.
First comes a rage-baiting setup. An innocent person is wrongfully fired, evicted, scammed, loses their rightful place on public transport, or faces judicial overreach. This is followed by a turnaround. The underdog is redeemed while the adversary is defeated, humiliated, and shamed, often as a representation of public shaming.
In many tales, narrators possess sealed documents that turn the tables on tormentors. These often appear in divorce disputes or the execution of a relative’s estate. Or it could be something simple, like an airline passenger who fiercely retains their assigned seat when rude moochers lay claim to it. The adversary then suffers a walk of shame to the back of the plane.
These stories are shockingly popular. They routinely garner hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views. They get hundreds of likes and dozens of reposts. Some of that traffic is likely from bots.
The numbers reveal something about us: a hunger for fairness, a lust for retribution. Reading them gives a jolt of dopamine as justice prevails. The AI knows this and reliably churns out content we cannot resist.
The creator behind the handle BIGBEN
Jenna Russell, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland studying AI writing, told me it is blindingly simple to generate these mini-melodramas. She says spammers have simply optimised for the least effort and the most engagement. They use easy, well-known tropes and prompt AI to write something that fits the bill.
That is the case with the person who goes by the handle BIGBEN. He posted the climactic courtroom scene mentioned above. He was the only storyteller I contacted who answered my direct message invitation to explain his process.
At first, he did not seem to understand how a journalistic exchange worked. He thought I was suggesting a partnership. If we uploaded his stories to Backchannel, he suggested I could generate cash flow from my end. I explained that scheme would not work for WIRED.
I just wanted to hear how he worked. Before I give out my leverage, what’s in it for me? he asked.
Nonetheless, BIGBEN, who claimed he was a 21-year-old trader living in Nigeria, did share his process. He contended that some stories come from experiences people shared with him. He fessed up to using AI to write for him.
When it is time to make up a new story, he gives just Grok or ChatGPT a prompt. The first post in a story thread he posted earlier this week, presumably narrated by a second wife abused by her in-laws, notched 1.5 million views in two days.
X pays him every two weeks as part of its Creative Revenue Sharing program. BIGBEN says the paychecks are usually between $500 and $700. Others report earning thousands of dollars in each cycle.
What it means
Compared to X posts involving rage, misinformation, porn, and stolen content, these stories of protagonist redemption and villain-shaming are fairly harmless. If you are curious what happened to the woman on trial in BIGBEN’s courtroom tale, her husband’s scheme to frame her was thwarted by her nine-year-old son. The boy had planted a digital recorder in dad’s office that exonerated the narrator and put hubby behind bars.
A neat denouement, but a hollow one considering it was a fabricated tale posted just for clicks. That hollow feeling may well become all too familiar as AI writing proliferates.
