A suspect named Lan Mou has been detained by Chinese police on suspicion of identity theft in connection with the StarkNet (STRK) airdrop.

On April 25, the suspect was taken into custody in the Guangdong Province, along with two cell phones and a computer.

An article in the local media on April 30 claims that Lan Mou filed more than 40 fraudulent Early Community Member Programme (ECMP) airdrop forms using the identities of other people, claiming more than 40,000 STRK tokens that rightfully belonged to the victims.

After the airdrop, the suspect moved the pilfered STRK tokens to an OKX wallet, where they were exchanged for more than $91,000 in Tether (USDT).

Scams and phishing attempts are not uncommon in the cryptocurrency world, but identity theft for the purpose of obtaining airdrops from other users seems to be occurring on a massive scale to be an unprecedented occurrence.

The StarkNet Foundation, the organization supporting the Ethereum layer-2 Starknet network, launched a 700 million STRK token airdrop on Feb.

20 to reward Ethereum solo and liquid stakers, Starknet developers and users, as well as projects and developers outside the Web3 ecosystem. The airdrop generated significant interest, with the first 45 million STRK tokens being claimed in less than 90 minutes.

However, the STRK airdrop was not without controversy. On Feb. 20, pseudonymous Yearn.finance developer Banteg warned that the StarkNet’s eligibility list primarily included airdrop squatters, or professional airdrop hunters, who only farm protocols with an incoming airdrop in hopes of financial gains.

Banteg alleged that approximately 701,544 of the 1.3 million eligible wallet addresses were linked to repeat or renamed GitHub accounts controlled by airdrop squatters seeking to compound their rewards.

This incident is not the first time airdrop hunters have exploited token distributions. In March 2023, it was revealed that airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from the Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop from 1,496 wallets into just two wallets under their control