A team built KagamiAI at ETHGlobal New Delhi in September 2025, where it was selected as one of 10 finalists out of 616 projects. The team worked the entire weekend and collected real user feedback.

Shortly after, another participant copied the entire project — the code, the application, and even the demo video (which included the voice of one of the original team members) — and submitted it to a different hackathon (HackQuest).

The original team documented everything publicly and called for HackQuest to remove the fraudulent submission.

Developer Shubh built getblink.fun — a no-code platform for creating Solana Blinks (193 commits, created August 2024). He applied for a SuperteamIN grant twice and was rejected both times, then closed the project due to costs.

Another developer, who had previously DM'd Shubh asking for help and received a link to the repository “to learn from,” copied the entire codebase line-by-line, renamed it “Blinker,” and won a SuperteamEarn grant.

When confronted with side-by-side code comparisons, the copier blocked the original author and deleted everything — their account, website, and repository. SuperteamIN acknowledged the report and began an investigation into the incident.

CRED, the Indian fintech company founded by Kunal Shah, announced the Rabbit Hole AI Hackathon with a ₹50 lakh (~$60,000) prize. The original terms stated that all intellectual property rights in submissions “shall be deemed to be work for hire” and that CRED would own everything built during the event.

The backlash was immediate and massive. Developer Aditya Oberai's post calling it “a masterclass in how NOT to organize a hackathon” received over 1,100 likes. An IP lawyer warned participants that the terms amounted to “shrewdly asking you to give your idea, build it for them, and give you nothing in return.”

Additional complaints emerged: CRED required “Login with CRED” for registration (unrelated to the hackathon) and ran credit score checks on applicants without clear disclosure.

Kunal Shah responded within 24 hours: “Fair call outs on IP. Shouldn't have been there to start with. Dropping it.” The terms were revised to state: “Participants shall own all rights in their respective submissions.”

During Devconnect Buenos Aires in November 2025, two separate hackathons ran in the same city. ETHGlobal's event (475 projects, $500,000 in prizes) paid all winners on time with no public disputes. Meanwhile, Ethereum Argentina's “Tierra de Buidlers” hackathon on TAIKAI (~355 participants, ~$30,000 in prizes) had a different outcome.

At the Ethereum Argentina hackathon, a team built two separate projects in different repositories with independent commit histories. One team member started solo, then a second joined. Both projects were approved, went through judging, and one won a prize.

In February 2026 — over two months later — the team was disqualified for “farming” and “shared codebase” — without any technical comparison of the code being provided as evidence.

When the team requested proof — a diff, a commit analysis, anything showing their codebases were shared — none was provided. The team was subsequently blocked from communication.

The contrast is instructive: at the same Devconnect, one organizer (ETHGlobal) ran a transparent process at scale and paid winners without incident; the other (Ethereum Argentina) disqualified a winning team months later without providing technical evidence.

The Bolt hackathon — billed as “the world's largest hackathon” with 130,000+ registered builders and over $1 million in prizes — faced detailed criticism on Hacker News:

17 out of 20 main prizes went to projects from the US, Canada, and EU — despite those regions representing only ~25% of participants. At least one winner submitted a project with no working demo — only localhost screenshots and what critics described as an “AI-generated video.” Another winner reportedly did not submit a deployed URL, despite hosted URLs being explicitly required by the rules.

When participants raised concerns, Bolt moderated them off Reddit and Discord and blocked critics from posting.

Multiple participants independently corroborated the complaints, noting their fully functional, deployed projects lost to submissions with non-working demos.

At a 48-hour hackathon organized by Geethanjali College of Engineering and Technology in March 2025, external participants paid ₹450 per person to attend and built fully functional projects.

All 6 prizes — 2 in each of the 3 categories (AI/ML, IoT, Open Innovation) — went exclusively to teams from the host college. Participants reported that several winning projects were “GPT-paste” with no understanding of the underlying code, and one IoT category winner's project did not function at all.

When external teams raised complaints in the event's group chat, organizers deleted posting permissions and ignored all further communication.

At HackWithUttarPradesh, hosted by Chandigarh University in November 2025, an external participant reported:

• No food provided despite promises
• Participants slept in corridors
• Biased judging favoring internal teams
• External teams completely ignored during evaluation
• Overall experience described as “a college promo, not a hackathon”

The pattern is identical to Case 6 (Geethanjali College) — host institution takes all prizes, external participants are treated as extras.

In December 2025, a community member documented that well-known crypto community leaders were “going from hackathon to hackathon, submitting the same project repeatedly without any shame whatsoever” — tagging ETHIndia, Devfolio, and other events.

No platform checks whether a submission has already won elsewhere. No cross-platform verification exists. The same codebase, the same demo, the same pitch — different prize pools.