Posted on Sep 15

The fake GitHub economy no one talks about: Stars, Followers, and $5k Accounts.

#webdev #programming #github #discuss

From $8 star packs to $5,000 achievement-loaded profiles, here’s how clout is being sold on GitHub.”

GitHub isn’t just where developers push code and fight over tabs vs spaces. It’s also where the weirdest underground market you’ve never heard of is thriving. Think less “open source utopia” and more “dark alley bazaar,” except instead of knockoff sneakers, you’re buying repo stars, followers, and even entire pre-leveled accounts.

And here’s the part that makes me wince: I’ve fallen for it. Once upon a sprint, I cloned a repo with thousands of stars thinking I’d found my next dependency gem… only to discover half-baked code that didn’t even compile. My terminal looked like it had been hit with a denial-of-service attack. That’s when it clicked: stars aren’t just code kudos they’re clout. And clout is for sale.

This isn’t just about vanity. There are sellers flogging GitHub accounts with “achievements,” trending manipulation services, and even premium profiles that cost as much as a mid-tier gaming laptop. It’s absurd and, honestly, a little dangerous for open source trust.

Stars as github’s fake social currency

On paper, GitHub stars are harmless. They’re a quick way to say “nice repo” without leaving a comment. But over the years, they’ve turned into something closer to likes on Instagram or retweets on Twitter social currency for developers. And wherever there’s currency, you get markets.

The going rate?

Around €8 for 100 stars if you’re buying the cheap, disposable kind. These come from blank, low-effort accounts spun up the second you check out through a Stripe portal.

Want something more “legit”?

There are premium stars that cost nearly 10x more because they come from accounts with actual histories sometimes even ones tied to real devs at real companies. It’s the difference between buying 100k TikTok bots and buying followers with verified checkmarks.

Security researchers have shown this isn’t just theory. A 2024 study found over 4.5 million suspected fake stars on GitHub, many tied to short-lived or even malicious repositories (He et al., arXiv). Journalists at Wired went further, actually buying stars and watching them appear within hours of payment (Wired).

And to spot the difference, open-source tools like Astronomer grade stargazers on a credibility scale from:

A (real contributors with long histories) down to -> E (obvious bots).

Real repos land near the top. “Premium” purchased stars sometimes look passable, but the cheap ones sink straight to the bottom.

Here’s the kicker: the repos with fake stars don’t magically get better. I once cloned a “trending” project that had thousands of stars, expecting solid scaffolding for a side project. Instead, it was half-baked code that wouldn’t even compile. It felt like downloading a cracked game that boots to a blue screen.

Forks, followers, and $5k accounts

Stars are just the entry point. Once you fall into this rabbit hole, you realize the GitHub clout market sells everything.

Forks? Check. Followers? Check.

Repo watchers to make it look like people are anxiously waiting for your next commit? Double check. If it’s a vanity metric on your profile, someone’s monetized it.

And then there are full-blown accounts for sale. A basic one goes for around $25. For that, you get a profile picture (usually stock-photo “developer dude”), a generic bio (“Full-stack | Open source enthusiast | Coffee addict”), and a handful of random commits. The kicker? These shady sellers throw in a “1-month guarantee” like it’s a broken eBay GPU. If the account gets banned, they’ll replace it.

But the premium tier is where it gets ridiculous. Sellers offer “achievement-loaded” GitHub accounts profiles stacked with contributions to popular repos, long commit histories, and those flashy green-square gardens. Price tag: upwards of $5,000. That’s basically a high-end gaming rig, except instead of frames per second, you’re buying fake credibility points.

I even saw sellers advertising “pick your own GitHub trophies.” Want that Arctic Code Vault Contributor badge without actually contributing? Pay up. Need to look like you’ve merged PRs into Linux? There’s a package for that.

It’s absurd when you think about it. Developers are out here buying GitHub accounts like World of Warcraft players buying max-level characters. The difference is, in WoW you get a raid-ready mage. In GitHub, you get a plastic dev persona that collapses the second someone asks you to debug a function.

Why anyone spends real money on this

So why would anyone drop cash on fake stars or a pre-built GitHub account? After all, it’s not like recruiters are scrolling through repos with a magnifying glass and verifying every commit. Or… are they?

The first (and most obvious) reason is venture capital flexing. You’re pitching your shiny new startup, and the VC asks about traction. What’s easier to show than a repo with thousands of stars “from the community”? Never mind that half those stars came from bots in Uzbekistan the deck looks good, and good decks raise money.

Then there’s the recruiter trap. Some hiring pipelines still screen devs by peeking at their GitHub gardens. A profile with dense green squares and a few repos trending on GitHub feels like proof you live and breathe code. But it’s like judging someone’s cooking skills by their Instagram food pics you don’t know if it tastes like cardboard. Still, for job seekers desperate to get past lazy filters, faking the aesthetics can feel like a shortcut.

Another angle? Trending manipulation. GitHub’s trending page isn’t immune to being gamed. Enough stars, forks, or watchers in a short time window, and your project shoots up. That visibility can snowball into real adoption if people assume “everyone else” is checking it out. It’s like paying people to clap at your comedy show so others start laughing too.

And finally, the weirdest theory: status signaling. Some devs just want to look cooler on the internet. Same way people buy Instagram likes or fake YouTube subs, but with a GitHub flavor. Apparently, repo forks are the new six-pack abs.

Credibility hacks and the xz backdoor

If you think fake stars are just harmless ego boosts, remember the XZ backdoor from 2024. That wasn’t just a random supply-chain bug it was a case study in how fragile developer trust really is. A malicious contributor gained credibility over months, slowly becoming a respected maintainer, before slipping in a backdoor that nearly compromised half the internet.

Now imagine how much easier that game gets when credibility itself is for sale. A GitHub account with a five-year commit history, dozens of followers, and contributions to popular repos looks like gold to an open source project scrambling for help. But if that account was bought for $5,000 on Telegram, what you really have is a wolf in a hoodie.

And here’s the scary part: even seasoned developers can fall for it. When you’re triaging PRs or reviewing issues late at night, you don’t have time to dig into every contributor’s background. You glance at their profile, see a forest of green squares and a couple badges, and assume they’re legit. Social engineering 101: give people the signals they’re trained to trust, and they’ll skip the deeper checks.

Communities like LWN and threads on Hacker News have already dissected how the XZ exploit slipped past so many eyes. One lesson stands out: credibility is a currency in open source. And just like any currency, once you can buy it, you can counterfeit it.

How to tell fake clout from real code

If GitHub stars, followers, and “gardens” can all be faked, how do you actually separate legit projects from the plastic ones? Developers need better heuristics than “big numbers good.” Here’s a framework you can steal, bookmark, and use the next time you’re evaluating a repo for work or side projects.

1. Look at issues
Scroll past the stars and check the issues tab. Are there active discussions? Do maintainers respond? A repo with 10k stars and zero issue activity is like a restaurant with 500 five-star reviews and no customers inside. Something’s off.

2. Read the commit history
Real projects have steady commits over time, usually from more than one contributor. Fake or abandoned projects often show a massive dump of code on day one, followed by silence. Bonus red flag: commits that all come from one suspicious account with no other activity.

3. Compare stars to forks
Healthy projects often have a balance if a repo has 5k stars but only 2 forks, that’s weird. Forks usually track alongside stars because devs clone and modify code they actually use. Think of it like downloads vs likes: if nobody’s running the code, who’s starring it?

4. Use astronomer or similar tools
The Astronomer tool grades stars on credibility. It isn’t perfect, but if a repo’s star profile shows a flood of low-trust accounts, you know something smells like week-old ramen.

5. Check pull requests and reviews
This one’s underrated. Fake accounts don’t grind through code reviews or argue about edge cases in PR threads. If the PR history shows thoughtful back-and-forth from multiple contributors, that’s a solid trust signal.

I learned this the hard way. A few years back, a friend’s side project had maybe 50 stars. Recruiters ignored it completely. But when he demoed it at a small conference, actual developers started using it, filing issues, and sending PRs. Within a few months, that repo went from invisible to indispensable in its niche without buying a single fake star.

TLDR checklist:

Issues alive? ✅
Commits steady? ✅
Stars/forks balanced? ✅
Stars graded legit? ✅
PRs with real back-and-forth? ✅

That’s your litmus test. Stars can be plastic, but healthy repos leave fingerprints you can’t fake.

What this means for open source trust

The uncomfortable truth is that open source has always run on trust. We trust that maintainers aren’t sneaking in backdoors. We trust that contributors are who they say they are. And we trust that metrics like stars or contributions actually mean something. The black market for GitHub clout blows a hole straight through that system.

For hiring, it means recruiters lean even harder on surface-level metrics that can be faked. Green squares, repo stars, and trending badges were already shallow signals; now they’re actively compromised. A dev with a quiet but solid OSS project might get overlooked, while someone with a $5k achievement-loaded account lands an interview. That’s not just unfair it’s corrosive to the idea that code speaks louder than hype.

For open source communities, it raises the stakes. We need stronger signals: verified contributors, signed commits, reproducible builds. Otherwise, the next XZ-level backdoor could slide through because we trusted an account with plastic credentials.

And for individual developers, the lesson is simple: stop chasing plastic GitHub gardens. Stars don’t pay rent. Real contributions, thoughtful PRs, and working code do. If you’re grinding for clout, at least grind for something you can’t buy in a Telegram channel.

Conclusion

Clout markets pop up anywhere vanity metrics exist. Instagram has fake followers, YouTube has fake subs, Twitter (sorry X) has botted likes. GitHub was never going to be immune. Stars, forks, and even full accounts now have a price tag, and as long as those signals carry weight with recruiters, VCs, or OSS maintainers, someone will be willing to pay.

But here’s the thing: repos aren’t Instagram selfies. Code actually has to work. You can fake a star count, but you can’t fake a bug fix that saves someone’s weekend, or a PR that gets merged into a critical library. Those are the real signals the ones that matter long after clout-chasing profiles get banned.

So yeah, the shady GitHub clout market exists. And yeah, it’s probably bigger than most of us want to admit. But the way forward isn’t to obsess over who’s gaming the system it’s to stop valuing the signals that are so easy to game in the first place.

If you’ve ever been fooled by a repo’s shiny but plastic garden, don’t sweat it. Most of us have. The trick is learning to look past the green squares and stars to see the messy, human fingerprints of real code.