Chinese authorities have captured a person suspected of identity forgery related to the StarkNet (STRK) airdrop.
The suspect has assumed other people’s identities and submitted over 40 false Early Community Member Program (ECMP) airdrop forms, claiming over 40,000 STRK tokens that initially belonged to the victims.
Following the airdrop, the suspect transferred over 40,000 STRK tokens to an OKX wallet, which were converted to over $91,000 worth of Tether (USDT), according to an April 30 local media report.
The suspect, identified as Lan Mou, was captured by the police in the Guangdong Province on April 25, along with a computer and two mobile phones.
While scams and phishing attacks are widespread in the cryptocurrency space, identity theft for claiming other users’ airdrops on such a large scale seems to be a first.
A crypto airdrop is a way of distributing new cryptocurrency, generally for early users who interacted with a certain protocol.
The StarkNet Foundation — the organization supporting the Ethereum layer-2 Starknet network — launched a 700 million STRK token airdrop on Feb. 20. The airdrop aimed to reward Ethereum solo and liquid stakes, Starknet developers and users, as well as projects and developers outside the Web3 ecosystem.
The airdrop saw significant interest as the first 45 million STRK tokens were claimed in less than 90 minutes.
Related: Lazarus Group laundered over $200M in hacked crypto since 2020
STRK airdrop was filled with airdrop squatters
On Feb. 20, pseudonymous Yearn.finance developer Banteg warned that the StarkNet’s eligibility list mainly included airdrop squatters, or professional airdrop hunters, who only farm protocols with an incoming airdrop in hopes of financial gains.
According to the developer, approximately 701,544 of the 1.3 million eligible wallet addresses were allegedly linked to repeat or renamed GitHub accounts controlled by airdrop squatters — who usually farm the same airdrop with multiple addresses to compound the rewards.
Last March, it was revealed that airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from the then Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop from 1,496 wallets into just two wallets they had controlled.
Related: EigenLayer sees over 12,000 queued withdrawals — How far will TVL fall?
