Comment by mapmeld

Making the conversations about VCs expecting thousands of stars, is thinking too big. It's probably more often someone pays $20 to make one of their projects look good, for their CV, for vanity, thinking this will get them the push that they need to get clicks on reddit, or noticed over some other open source project. If there is someone offering a 10k star project an investment over 8k without looking at the project or revenue potential, I can only think they are clueless, or picking a student project to fund each summer.

The fake accounts often star my old repos to look like real users. They are usually very sketchy if you think for a minute, for example starring 5,000 projects in a month and no other GitHub activity. One time I found a GitHub Sponsor ring, which must be a money laundering / stolen credit cards thing?