Chinese law enforcement apprehended an individual suspected of identity forgery related to StarkNet (STRK) airdrop.
Accordingly, the suspect assumed 40 identities and submitted false Early Community Member Program (ECMP) airdrop forms.
In a local media report, the suspect transferred over 40,000 STRK tokens from the victims to an OKX wallet, converted to over $91,000 worth of Tether after airdrop.
On April 25, the suspect, identified as Lan Mou, was captured by police in Guangdong Province, along with a computer and two mobile phones. Currently, the individual has been subjected to legal measures as per the law, and the case is under further investigation.
Over the past years, scams and phishing attacks have become widespread in the crypto space. However, recent identity theft for claiming other users' airdrops on such a large scale stands as a first case.
In February, the StarkNet Foundation supporting the Ethereum layer-2 Starknet network launched a 700 million STRK token airdrop, as per Cointelegraph. This event aimed to reward Ethereum solo and liquid stakes as well as projects and developers outside Web3.
Remarkably, the airdrop saw interest as the first 45 million STRK tokens were claimed in less than 90 minutes.
Apart from community members, hackers participated in the airdrop craze. In March, hacked vanity wallet addresses were used to steal $500,000 worth of ARB tokens from eligible participants.
In a post on the X platform, Yearn.finance developer Banteg warned StarkNet's eligibility list included professional airdrop hunters, who farm protocols with incoming airdrop for financial gains.
The developer said approximately 701,544 of 1.30 million eligible wallets allegedly linked to repeat or renamed GitHub accounts controlled by squatters farming the same airdrop with multiple addresses.
In 2023, airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop from 1,496 wallets into two controlled wallets.