Lets pretend we don't know it's a scam and look at the basic math.Total AUR = 7,883,372
From the Wiki:
When phase one of the airdrop had completed on July 24, 2014 it was estimated that 1,126,674 AUR had been disbursed among 35,430 claimants.
Phase 2 claim was increased to 318 coins. About 5024 claims totalling almost 1.6 million coins were made
Phase 3 nearly 1.7 million coins being claimed by more than 2600 Icelanders. By this time the price had fallen so sharply that the payout had increased to 636 coins per recipient
Total AUR = 7,883,372
Phase 1 = 1,126,674 (14.3% total supply)
Phase 2 = 1,600000 (20.2% total supply)
Phase 3 = 1,700000 (21.5% total supply)
Foundation +- 1 000000 (12.6% total supply)
Total % distributed = 56% to a total of 43054 claimants.5,344,628 was burned a no longer part of the total supply.
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/aur/#!rich
Wealth Distribution:Top N addresses Holdings Percentage
Top 10 2,122,527 AUR 26.92 %
Top 100 5,025,521 AUR 63.75 %
Top 1000 6,542,710 AUR 82.99 % All 34183 7,883,397 AUR 100 %
This should raise some serious eyebrows, I would suggest that 5% made it to real people in Iceland as a best case scenario.
If you take a look at the rich list distribution for Auroracoin you can see that 17k addresses have between 10-100 coins and another 3k have more than 100 coins. These are the ones that claimed and did not sell.
2.7k have between 1-10 and 3.5k have between 0.1-1 and I'm guessing these are the people that sold or tried to sell on Mintpal and Cryptsy.
NB. the two largest addresses after the AURburn.. address with ~500k Auroracoin are Cryptsy's and Mintpal's cold wallets, which I believe are lost forever.
In total there are ~34K addresses and of course when the airdrop was live some people claimed for their parents, spouses or children so there are addresses that got many claims. In other cases some addresses might have tens or hundreds of claims that can be explained by high school kids collecting airdrops from other kids but usually these kids got paid upfront with cash and someone collected the airdrop with the only purpose of selling for profit.
Buying and selling Auroracoin for profit is not strange if you think about it, guess we are all doing it up to a point.
There was one case of fraud that Baldur himself (the creator of Auroracoin) told us about and it didn't involve him. This happened late in phase 2 of the airdrop where someone created a Facebook scam that was disguised as a lottery from a Icelandic company, N1. This person got people to give him access to their Facebook page and this person claimed airdrops with it. After this Baldur disabled Facebook to claim airdrop coins.
NB, the price had fallen down to today's level after phase 1 but this scammer claimed for perhaps 100-500 people but didn't really get rich from this.
https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-auroracoin-addresses.htmlOut of the 2600 claims of 638 AUR only 383 addresses have that amount in them.
Out of the 5024 claims of 318 AUR only 615 addresses have that amount in them.
Have a look at the repeats in these addresses with the same timestamp, one of many examples.
https://bitinfocharts.com/auroracoin/address/AUsgL2eYQZjcJyQdic9iyDikMXv8Ye9S86https://bitinfocharts.com/auroracoin/address/APCYhB59KAPrrjaho3Hgf2ujDc911oPcvshttps://bitinfocharts.com/auroracoin/address/AXbfsRW5fUaCFhMLMwjHdkBnDUaBigx4Gvhttps://bitinfocharts.com/auroracoin/address/AY1adUH7inLpFkb62AwoTBroW26unwQ8ewOne of many examples is a address that has claimed one of each airdrop type
There is real claims that were made but a lot of obvious rigged claims in the mix.