Chinese authorities have arrested a man named Lan Mou, who is suspected of falsifying personal data to steal StarkNet airdrop. This is reported by local media.
He was detained on April 25 in Guangdong Province. He had a computer and two phones with him.
Thanks to the personal information he received, Mou allegedly posed as other people and submitted more than 40 fake requests to the Early Community Member Program from the StarkNet Foundation.
This program was intended for early users of the protocol, who helped in detecting bugs and developing the project.
According to the investigation, Mou created a large number of addresses for STRK, and also bought accounts in Telegram and Discord. He searched for tickers for drop requests on GitHub.
Thanks to this scheme, he managed to receive more than 40,000 STRK, which he converted into 90,000 USDT through the OKX exchange.
On February 20, StarkNet unblocked 728 million STRK (7.3% of the issue) for more than 1.3 million wallets as part of the airdrop. During the distribution, the project was criticized by the community due to failures and conditions of its receipt.
Then the developer of Yearn.Finance under the pseudonym 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 are allegedly linked to duplicate or renamed GitHub accounts.
Recall that in February, experts discovered an airdrop-hunting scheme via GitHub. Users have started sending spam comments in project repositories, which are expected to distribute tokens in the future.