Chinese Authorities Detain Suspected StarkNet Airdrop Thief

Chinese authorities have arrested a man named Lan Mou, suspected of forging personal data to steal StarkNet airdrops, according to local media.

He was detained on April 25 in Guangdong province, in possession of a computer and two phones.

With the acquired personal information, Mou allegedly impersonated others and submitted over 40 fraudulent requests to the Early Community Member Program by the StarkNet Foundation.

This program was intended for early protocol users who assisted in bug detection and project development.

According to the investigation, Mou created numerous addresses for STRK and purchased accounts on Telegram and Discord. He sought application tickers for the airdrop on GitHub.

Through this scheme, he managed to obtain over 40,000 STRK, which he converted into 90,000 USDT via the OKX exchange.

On February 20, StarkNet unlocked 728 million STRK (7.3% of the issuance) for more than 1.3 million wallets as part of the airdrop. During the distribution, the project faced community criticism due to disruptions and the conditions for obtaining it.

At that time, Yearn.Finance developer known as banteg warned that the StarkNet drop attracted a large number of airdrop hunters. According to him, approximately 701,544 of the 1.3 million eligible addresses were allegedly linked to duplicate or renamed GitHub accounts.

Earlier in February, experts identified an airdrop hunting scheme through GitHub. Users began sending spam comments in project repositories expected to distribute tokens in the future.