Damn,this is clever in a bad way.
I guess that having to download the software from a Github repository can raise some reg flags and more people will refuse to download it,because it doesn't look professional.
Not necessary to raise red flags because I have seen several open source projects that just let the users download the binaries and execute the program on their computers.
Hosting on Github helps to give users a false sense of trust that all the code is right in front of you if they had hosted on their own website, chances are lesser people would have downloaded.
I wanna know whether antiviruses are capable to detect such backdoors or not. If yes, then this scam could have been avoided by just using a decent AV.