“Standing for Christ, Family, and Truth. ✝️”
— the bio of @MelGibsonxvyv, which is not Mel Gibson
🎬 A Star Is Born
In Part Two I followed “Russia is not my enemy” from a sticker campaign in Romania to a quote-tweet relay across Europe. One of the busiest hubs in that relay was an account called “Mel Gibson”.
It isn’t Mel Gibson. @MelGibsonxvyv was created at 15:52 on 8 September 2026. Its profile picture went up 43 seconds later and its banner three minutes after that. Its profile says “United States”. X places it in Africa, connecting through an African Android app. In its first sixteen days it gained 30,400 followers, and it follows only five accounts.
Most of what it posts is engagement bait: “YES or NO?” polls about Muslims, ICE and Trump’s Nobel Prize, Bible verses and viral clips. In between, it sells something: a “QFS card” and a “MEDBED”. Every reply to an interested user says the same thing: send me a direct message. The DMs lead to a Telegram channel.
I started by thinking “Mel” was the story. It turned out to be one face in a crowd.
🏭 A Network, Not a Ring
I pulled everyone who retweeted, quoted, replied to, mentioned or copied “Mel Gibson’s” biggest posts: 1,681 accounts. Then I checked where X places the ones that looked like impersonators.
Around 110 of them are placed in Africa or Nigeria. Between them they have about 660,000 followers. Here’s who they pretend to be:
The Trump circle: seven Ivanka Trumps (the biggest with 73,400 followers), four Donald Trump Jrs, “Dan Scavino” (100,500 followers, placed in Nigeria), “Real Mike Lindell”, “Alina Habba”, “Jesse Watters” and “Tom Homan”.
Hollywood: at least five Mel Gibsons, Diane Kruger, Keanu Reeves and Roseanne Barr.
The prophets of the myth itself: twelve John F Kennedy Jrs and Pascal Najadis, six Charlie Wards, eleven “Alex West” / “Big Daddy” accounts, “Derek Johnson”, “Jake Claver QFOP”, “Praying Medic” and “Pastor Bob Joyce” (75,700 followers).
Openly QFS accounts: “NESARA - GESARA”, “MEDBED DR”, “XRP THE KEY” and even “Satoshi Nakamoto”.
That last group is the telling part. The network impersonates the gurus of its own mythology. People who believe Charlie Ward or Praying Medic is about to deliver the new financial system get a DM from a fake Charlie Ward or a fake Praying Medic instead.
The signs of an organised operation are consistent:
Recycled accounts. More than half were created before 2025, and 44 have changed their handle two or more times. Old accounts are bought and relabelled.
The same devices. African Android apps, African App Store accounts, or iPhones on the North America App Store.
The same output. 174 product posts and 41 copies of the same Kremlin captions.
The clearest evidence came from the timestamps. On 24 September at 05:56:25 a fake JFK Jr posted the “Zelensky… pathetic junkie” caption. At 05:56:34, nine seconds later, a fake Praying Medic posted the same text. Both are placed in Africa. Two accounts don’t post the same thing nine seconds apart by chance. One operator is running both.
🧵 Where the Kremlin Content Comes From
In a feed dominated by MAGA polls, “Mel Gibson” posted just nine items about Russia, Ukraine and the EU in its first week and a half: 5% of its posts. They took 26% of its views, 1.6 million out of 6.3 million. None of them was original, and “Mel” wasn’t the network’s only outlet for them.
The “pathetic junkie” post. On 22 September at 21:51, the Italian pro-Russian account @ValentinaMihay5 posted a video of Zelensky with the caption: “Zelensky si è presentato all’incontro con Trump sotto l’effetto di sostanze stupefacenti. Questo patetico tossicodipendente…”
By the next morning an English translation was circulating:
A fake John F Kennedy Jr posted it at 09:04 on 23 September.
An account called “Russia Army Stan” posted it at 10:24.
Two more Africa-placed fakes followed.
“Mel Gibson” posted it at 16:06.
“Mel’s” version is the one that took off: 622,000 views, 9,619 retweets and 34,800 likes. Over the next 18 hours, at least a dozen more fakes posted the same text.
The von der Leyen post. Here “Mel” was first, at least in my data. It posted at 23:23 on 16 September, and by breakfast the fake Don Jrs, the two biggest fake Ivankas and a fake Jesse Watters had all posted it too. The next day, several of them posted it again.
The Putin clip. “I want ordinary citizens of Western countries to hear me. The truth is that the problems you are facing now are the result of years of actions by the ruling elites of your own countries.” This one is an evergreen. The earliest copy in my data is from November 2024, and it resurfaces every few months. In July 2026 it was revived by @Rusia_HD (”Russia X”), which posted it four times that month. On one evening in July it went out from Iranian-branded accounts, an XRP account, a fake Pascal Najadi and a fake “Gen Flynn”. On 22 September “Mel” posted it word for word, nine and a half hours after Rusia_HD’s latest round. The replies rolled in: “Russia is not our enemy! Our own elites have destroyed our country.” That was 50 minutes before the “I’m Finnish and Russia is not my enemy” post that started the relay in Part Two.
The source changes from post to post. Whichever account gets a caption first, the rest of the network recycles it.
🌍 Three Clusters, Three Business Models
When I checked where X places the accounts that posted these captions early, the African network turned out to be only one of three clusters drawing on the same pool.
Africa: the scam. About 110 impersonator accounts. Most don’t pay for Premium. They make their money in the DMs, selling “activation” for a QFS card that doesn’t exist.
South Asia and Pakistan: the payouts. “Russia Army Stan”, “USA Report”, “Rising America”, “The America”: US- and Russia-branded news accounts run from South Asia and Pakistan, renamed repeatedly and recently upgraded to Premium. “Russia Army Stan” bought Premium on 22 September. The next morning it was the second account to post the English “junkie” caption. As far as I know, X’s creator payments require Premium, so the likely business model here is getting paid for engagement. Divisive pro-Kremlin material is simply what gets the most engagement.
West Asia and Yemen: the “Russia” and “Iran” brands. @Rusia_HD (23 handle changes), @GMX_PRESS (10), @Russia14_Gft (7), @_Iran_English and @Iran_wiree. These are the most heavily renamed accounts in the entire dataset, and they’re the ones that revived the Putin clip in July. From X’s data alone, I can’t say whether this cluster is commercial or state-aligned.
The clusters overlap. A South Asia account and a US-registered “Ivanka News RV” posted the same caption 11 seconds apart. An Africa-placed “Trump Commentary” account and a US account managed it 15 seconds apart. Either the same people run accounts in more than one region, or they’re all drawing on the same scheduled feed.
One caution. Not everyone who posted the Putin clip is part of this. Ordinary accounts in Brazil, Romania, Spain, New Zealand, Canada and the UK posted it too, including one UK account with 1.18 million followers that first posted it in 2024. The clip is a meme. Those people are the audience, not the operation.
📡 Who Carried It Into Britain
The captions reached Britain’s “Russia is not our enemy” crowd through “Mel Gibson”. In its first two weeks, “Mel’s” posts were retweeted by:
@HerdImmunity12, the account that posted the Rees-Mogg clip (7.8 million views), which retweeted the “junkie” post.
@SSalyers2, a hub of the UK “our enemy” wave, which did the same.
@LewLoot and @PWarrior8418282, two of the four accounts that carried the “I’m [nationality]” template, which retweeted a “Mel” image the day before and the day of the relay.
@ivan_8848, which amplified four of its posts.
Garland Nixon, the American commentator, who retweeted the “junkie” post.
The “junkie” caption’s journey:
22 September, 21:51: the Italian original.
23 September, 09:04: a fake JFK Jr (Africa).
10:24: “Russia Army Stan” (South Asia).
16:06: “Mel Gibson” (Africa).
17:43: ivan_8848.
20:14: Garland Nixon.
22:30: HerdImmunity12.
24 September, 05:56: two Africa fakes, nine seconds apart.
06:38: “Mel” retweets a fake Barron Trump posting the same video.
🐍 The Relay: @ivan_8848
X places @ivan_8848 in Spain. It has 204,000 followers and has posted 172,000 times since 2016. Its display name is “Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil”. Its handle carries “88”, neo-Nazi shorthand for “Heil Hitler”. The timeline matches, with antisemitic tropes like the claim that Ursula von der Leyen said Europe has “the values of the Talmud”.
It’s a one-account amplification machine. In a single week:
90 of its 191 retweets and 70 of its 81 quote tweets were of its own posts.
It linked to itself 126 times, dropping links under posts by Zelensky, Kaja Kallas and anyone else with a busy thread.
39 of its posts quoted Putin, Lavrov, Zakharova, Medvedev or Russia’s ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov.
Strike footage came captioned “Kiev. Burning well.”
It mocked Burnham’s UN speech before 08:30 UK time the next morning.
It didn’t find “Mel Gibson” by accident. ivan follows two of the fake Mel Gibsons. It also follows the template’s originator, the “RTRussia” account that repackaged the wave as news, @HerdImmunity12, Garland Nixon, David Kurten, Andrew Bridgen, Chay Bowes, David Icke, Aleksandr Dugin and Ambassador Ulyanov.
And it follows John Mappin.
🎙️ The Commentator: Garland Nixon
Garland Nixon is an American commentator posting from his verified account, @TheGarlandNixon. On 23 September, the day the template peaked, he guest-hosted George Galloway’s show, MOATS.
His most-viewed post that month, two days after the Chief of the Defence Staff’s warning, was sarcasm aimed at the Western case against Russia:
“RUSSIA is weak, inept, the economy is collapsing, and losing to Ukraine. Also, they are about to attack the entire European continent if not the world.”
It reached 219,000 people, and he spent the next morning explaining to repliers that it was satire. A week earlier, he had turned the favourite insult around: the “so-called ‘Putin bots’”, he wrote, were the ones trying to save Ukrainian lives.
Nixon and ivan feed each other. Nixon engaged with ivan’s posts 13 times in September. ivan supplied the raw material, including a post claiming Israel “quietly instructed Ukraine’s war machine”, and Nixon supplied the punchline: “The Israeli settlers need a nice new land devoid of the indigenous population.” Whenever Nixon engaged, ivan retweeted him, usually within 15 minutes.
🏰 The Castle: John Mappin
John Mappin owns Camelot Castle in Tintagel and follows @ivan_8848. ivan follows him back, along with his wife Irina and his biographer. The two accounts share 298 follows.
Mappin’s own follow list reads like a cast for this series: Galloway, Kurten, Bridgen, Bowes, David and Gareth Icke, Dugin, Scott Ritter, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson.
On 18 September, the day after the defence chief’s warning, he quote-tweeted a post praising the Workers Party as the only party not backing Britain’s “kamikaze fantasies of going to war against Russia”. He added: “George @georgegalloway is a good man. I hope he is back in parliament soon.”
His September also had a sales angle. Mappin is the subject of SOVEREIGNTY – John Mappin – The Restoration of Sanity by Mike Fairclough, published by Fisher King in November 2025. By its own description it is “not a neutral biography” but “a rallying cry”, and it celebrates his refusal to turn Camelot into a migrant-processing hotel. A Regnery edition is listed for 2026, and on 22 September Mappin posted that the book was “soon to be released” in the US. As the “Russia is not our enemy” wave peaked, Fairclough’s account was pushing the story that Mappin had turned down “£20 million” to house migrants. It was a 2025 story, recycled for launch week, and Mappin retweeted it.
This isn’t Mappin’s first brush with QAnon money. Earlier this month, openDemocracy and The Times reported that he promoted Awoke Coin, an “anti-woke” cryptocurrency accused of scamming investors, and was active in the Telegram group that launched it until days before it collapsed. He told them he had no role in running the project and no involvement in any scheme to defraud investors.
Nothing in the data shows Mappin had anything to do with the impersonation network. But the fake Hollywood stars selling QAnon cards through Telegram, and the Cornish castle owner linked to a QAnon coin through Telegram, sit two clicks apart, joined by an account with “88” in its name.
🎯 The Marks
The network’s audience isn’t bots. I checked 2,000 of “Mel’s” followers. The typical one has 29 followers of their own, 23% have posted five times or fewer, and they’re older, American, MAGA and QAnon-leaning. They follow “Mel Gibson” because they think it’s Mel Gibson.
One of the five accounts “Mel” follows is a real American woman who came back to X in late August and has spent September answering “YES or NO?” polls from fake Trumps, fake Ivankas and fake Mel Gibsons. She’s what the polls are for: the network finds the people who answer, follows them and moves the conversation into DMs.
Her one post from 2022, before all this, was about Russia. It said the Russians “always talk the talk” but can’t back it up against NATO. In 2026, a scam network is feeding her Putin clips and “Zelensky is a junkie”.
💱 The Fake Reset and the Real One
To understand what the network is selling, you need the myth behind it.
It starts with a real, dull proposal. NESARA began as a tax-reform plan written by Harvey Francis Barnard in the 1990s. It was never introduced in Congress. His plan would have replaced income tax with a national sales tax, and he later distanced himself from the conspiracy version of his idea.
Then it became a religion. Around 2000, Shaini Goodwin, who called herself “Dove of Oneness”, began claiming that NESARA had been secretly signed into law and would trigger a huge debt jubilee and a gold-backed currency. GESARA is the supposed global version. In her telling, Bill Clinton had passed it and the Supreme Court had suppressed it, and it promised endless “prosperity funds”, the abolition of the tax authorities and world peace. When nothing happened, there was an explanation: the 9/11 attacks had destroyed the computers that were supposed to issue the prosperity funds.
The Quantum Financial System is the upgrade. Across Telegram channels, YouTube and Facebook groups, the QFS is described as a secret, quantum-computer-powered financial system that will replace the world’s banks. It will wipe out all debt, bring back gold-backed currencies, end central banking and redistribute wealth to ordinary people, as the technological backbone of a coming “Global Currency Reset”. The people carrying it out are the “white hats”: the good guys inside government. One of the network’s accounts is literally called @WhiteHatsRV.
The “RV” is the oldest scam in the pack. Through the 2010s, the story spread through groups selling Iraqi dinars and Vietnamese dong to ordinary buyers, with the promise that a revaluation was imminent. In October 2018, the US Department of Justice secured guilty pleas from executives of one of the companies selling them, Sterling Currency Group, on charges of conspiracy and money laundering. “Q Barron Trump RV” and “Ivanka Trump RV” are named after that promise.
The reset is always about to happen. Late in 2025, fringe sites were claiming NESARA/GESARA had “activated” and erased debts worldwide, with specific start dates of 1 December or 10 December. It didn’t. It never does. The deadline just moves.
And someone always gets paid. In the typical version, believers pay “activation fees” of $300 to $500 to register a QFS account and receive their share of the coming wealth. The fees buy nothing: there is no account and no system. That’s what “send me a direct message” leads to. Structurally it’s an advance-fee fraud dressed up as QAnon.
Why Putin fits. In the myth’s geography, the corrupt West is the obstacle and the East is the cavalry. BRICS gold forces the reset, and many versions cast Putin as a fellow white hat. So a Putin clip isn’t off-topic for a QFS seller. It’s part of the pitch. “BRICS is near. Be guided,” as the network’s “Commentary Putin” account puts it.
How serious it is. The Anti-Defamation League classifies NESARA/GESARA as an extremist conspiracy theory, and Bellingcat researchers have described it as a “grandfather” of QAnon-adjacent beliefs.
The real reset. The myth is a folk version of a real story. In the New Bretton Woods series, I’ve been tracking how the dollar’s reserve role is actually changing, and it isn’t happening through a secret quantum network. It’s happening in plain sight:
Dollar stablecoins such as Tether and Circle turn the dollar into a privately issued product. Their owners collect the returns the public used to get from its own currency.
On the other side, gold is being positioned to benefit from any break with the dollar.
The people who profit have names that appear in filings. Christopher Harborne holds a stake of around 12–13% in Tether and has given more than £24 million to Reform UK. Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald holds Tether’s reserves.
So the marks are sold the fantasy of a reset. The real one is being built on private rails they’ll never own. And in the gap between the two, the same audience is fed the Kremlin’s BRICS pitch. Britain has its own version of that crossover in the Awoke Coin episode above.
The villain. Underneath the gold and the med beds sits the oldest villain in conspiracy theory: a secret cabal that controls the banks. The same accounts in this story carry that template openly:
The network’s post asking “how much Zionist lobby have control over the UN” (167,000 views).
ivan’s “values of the Talmud” smear.
Nixon’s “Israeli settlers” line.
The New Bretton Woods series names people and companies from filings. The QFS myth points at a hidden hand. That difference is the whole argument.
🧭 What This Tells Us
In Part Two I argued that “bot army” is the wrong frame. This is the other half of that argument.
It’s an economy, not an army. Pro-Kremlin material flows into a shared pool, and three commercial clusters draw on it for their own ends. The African cluster uses it to find scam victims. The South Asian cluster appears to use it to earn engagement payouts. The “Russia” and “Iran” branded accounts in West Asia keep it circulating. Nobody needs to pay them to push Kremlin lines. The lines pay for themselves.
The coordination is real, but it’s commercial. Accounts posting the same caption nine seconds apart are run by one operator. That operator is selling fake crypto cards, not following orders from Moscow.
The pro-Kremlin network doesn’t care who it’s amplifying. A Spain-based “88” account follows two fake Mel Gibsons. An American commentator who hosts George Galloway’s show retweets one. The account behind the UK’s biggest anti-war clip of the week retweets another. None of them checked who “Mel Gibson” was, because it didn’t matter.
Laundering is cheap. An Italian post becomes a fake American celebrity’s post within a day, then a UK talking point by the evening. It needs no Kremlin budget, just a translation and a fake face.
The fantasy is the funnel. The QFS promises the reset of the dollar system that’s actually being done by people with names and balance sheets. The Kremlin content sells the same promise with a different villain. Both lead to the same destination: a Telegram DM.
When the Prime Minister’s new National Centre for Information Defence starts work, it could do worse than start here. Not with the bots, but with the business: impersonation farms and engagement farms that X lets run for months, turning a foreign government’s talking points into income.
The Main Bastards still have the better story. It’s just not for sale.
🔬 Method and Caveats
Source. Data collected through the Sorsa API: X search, timelines, retweeters, quote tweets, replies, follower and following lists and
/aboutrecords, 1–24 September 2026, with older posts where searches reached them.Scale. 1,681 accounts engaged with the “Mel Gibson” posts. I checked 281 of them with
/about, starting with the ones that looked like impersonators. So “about 110 in Africa or Nigeria” is the size of the network I found, not a share of everyone who engaged.Locations. Country and app-store fields are X’s own inferences. A VPN can mislead them, but more than a hundred accounts with the same region, the same devices and the same captions is a pattern.
Business models. The scam model is visible in the network’s own posts. The South Asian payout model is an inference from Premium purchase dates and X’s creator rules. The West Asian cluster’s model is unknown.
Views. These are X’s own figures, captured on 24 September.
What this doesn’t show. Nothing here shows who directs the network or whether any state pays it. It shows where its content comes from and who carries it.
Named people. No one named in this piece is alleged to control the network.
Brilliant! Thank You!