I audited the 12 fastest-growing new GitHub repos for fake stars. Here's the base rate.

New repositories are where bought stars cluster, because the point of buying stars is to fake early traction. So I pointed an open-source auditor at a reproducible slice of GitHub: the most-starred public repos created in the last 90 days.

Method

Population: GitHub Search created:>2026-02-26 stars:>1000, sorted by stars (684 matched).

Sample: top 12 by star count (20k–192k stars).

Tool: fake-star-audit — one Python file, standard library only, anonymous GitHub API. Five timing/identity axes plus extended signals. Every verdict prints the evidence behind it.