GitHub Hall of Shame

13,499 repositories caught buying stars.

A peer-reviewed registry from the ICSE 2026 StarScout paper. Ranked by fame, searchable, and cross-checked against today's trending repos.

Read the paper · snapshot · Chrome extension for live checks

Trending now, scored live

The top six trending repos with the most suspect star activity — see the full leaderboard →

The wall

The 30 repos with the most to answer for — ranked by log₁₀(stars) × bought stars. Fame counts.

How they were caught

heuristic 1

Low activity

Accounts that starred this one repository and nothing else. The throwaway-account fingerprint of cheap fake-star sellers.

heuristic 2

Lockstep

Groups of 50+ accounts that hit many repos together in tight time windows. Sophisticated farm behavior, much harder to fake by hand.

validation

90% later banned

GitHub's Trust & Safety team has since deleted 90% of the accounts StarScout flagged. The strongest external signal any detector has produced.

Search all 13,499

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Repository Stars Bought % Shame

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Check any repo, live

This registry is a 2025-01-01 snapshot. For a live verdict on any repository, install the Chrome extension. The same algorithm runs on every GitHub page you visit.

184k real · 99% 1.2k real · 17%