Strangers are paying Daniel Berk's Cybertruck fund on X Money. A coin he didn't launch pays them back

At 5:18 PM ET on 5 October, Daniel Berk, who has about 15,000 followers on X, posted: "If 75,000 of you send me $1 on @XMoney I can go buy a Tesla Cybertruck and never get stuck in the Charleston floods ever again." It has been seen 1.7 million times. At 1:51 AM ET the next morning, someone launched a coin called Cybertruck on a new platform, Backers, naming him as its recipient.

At 12:09 PM ET he wrote: "Apparently someone launched a Cybertruck coin on this platform called @Try_Backers and there's like $600k trading on this coin with platform fees going directly to my X wallet to buy a Cybertruck loooooooool." At 12:41 PM ET he added: "Yeah to be clear I don't personally endorse Try Backers and had no idea they did this, but think it's cool and random." By 3:31 PM ET, Backers' own figures showed $5,450 delivered to him.

How Backers works, in its own words. Every coin is launched on pump.fun and names one X account as its recipient. The coin's pump.fun creator fees go into a pool on Backers' Solana program; Backers keeps 10%. Anyone can then "back" the recipient: you send them dollars yourself in X Money, paste the receipt link into Backers, and the pool repays you 1.1 times what you sent, in SOL. Backers' app says it "never moves your dollars and never posts on X for you," and that "Naming a recipient doesn't mean they endorse the coin." Fees not paid out within 14 days "may go back to Backers."

We checked that on-chain. A fee sweep on Backers' program (one of them) sends the creator fees into the coin's pool and 10% to Backers' fee vault, 4suth…4JF2. A repayment (one of them) pays the backer 0.228 SOL, about $27.50, for a $25 X Money payment. The money that reaches the recipient is real dollars from strangers; what repays the strangers is the coin's trading fees.

On 6 October, @Try_Backers posted that "by sending $25 to the @danielcberk Cybertruck fund you can get $52.50 back." That $52.50 is two payments. $27.50 comes from the coin's pool. The other $25 is a launch promotion Backers says it funds itself: a $2,500 budget, with $300 left at 3:31 PM ET. We traced where it's paid from. The promotion wallet, wJUg…DtT6, sends backers 0.207 SOL at a time, about $25 (one of them). Apart from dust, all the SOL it received, 71 in seven transfers, came from CLaZ…rd1a (the largest, 20 SOL), the wallet that created Backers' own token, $BACKERS, on pump.fun on 5 October. That wallet has collected about 405 SOL in pump.fun creator fees since then, from $BACKERS and one other coin it created. So the bonus comes out of the creator fees on Backers' own coins, not from the Cybertruck coin.

Is the trading that pays for it real? Backers' API showed 12,448 trades in a day on the Cybertruck coin, whose market value was about $30,000. We read a sample of one in 20 of the 5,060 pool transactions in its busiest hour, 12 to 1 PM ET, just after Daniel's post. Of the 228 sampled transactions that touched the pool, 150 came from nine arbitrage bots and moved no SOL. About a third of the SOL that did move went through one fee payer used by a trading service: it signed 10,000 transactions in eight minutes, across many coins, each co-signed by a different user's wallet. The rest came from about 36 other wallets. None of Backers' wallets we know of appears among them. On this sample, the fees look like ordinary trading, not volume Backers made itself.

Daniel isn't the only name on a coin. On 6 October Backers' first page of coins listed 24, naming among others @elonmusk, @nikitabier, @beffjezos, @mattt and @gabrielhaines. Backers' figures show $783 delivered to Elon Musk's X Money account through his coin. Of the 24 recipients, only Daniel has said in public whether he knew.

What it means for the people named. Strangers can send you money you didn't ask for, in your name, on a coin someone else launched. You don't control the coin or its pool, and Backers says it "cannot reverse, refund or recover" X Money payments. What happens if a backer reverses a payment after being repaid is up to X Money's rules, which we haven't found published.

One more thing: copies are already circulating. Posts on X promote trybackers.moonup.fun, a page titled "Backers | Airdrop" that asks visitors to "Claim Tokens." It isn't Backers' app, which is at trybackers.com. Don't connect a wallet to a copy. And since about 6:50 PM ET on 6 October, accounts on X have been promoting a different coin as $BACKERS: 24vWkfSdkSSwXN2EjUMfRhmJE4gvG4XCbvhqB1D7P7C5, created by a different wallet at 6:36 PM ET, per Jupiter. Backers' own token is CBLx6CRcCTtbmgTdxpqnF2dP1MpWbMUjngtNbFTApump, created by CLaZ…rd1a (checked at 10:34 PM ET on 6 October).

We'll publish any response from Backers here.