Search Telegram for "free Stars" and you'll find bots promising 5,000 Stars for joining a channel, generators that "add Stars to any account", and APKs that unlock "unlimited Stars". If you build on Telegram, your users will ask you about them, and some will lose their account to one.

The short answer is that a bot can't create Stars. The longer answer is more useful, because the Bot API tells you exactly what a bot can and can't do with Stars, and every one of these scams has to work around those limits. Once you know the limits, you can spot the trick.

Where Stars actually live

Telegram Stars are a balance on Telegram's servers, tied to an account. Users buy them inside Telegram (an in-app purchase, @PremiumBot or Fragment), and they move only when Telegram moves them. There is no client-side number to edit, no file on the phone that holds a balance, and no API that takes "add 5,000" as an argument.

So a "generator" has nowhere to write to.…