By topping the leaderboard plenty of people see it and donate their IP to them. What are you gonna do, claim your own IP for yourself and go up against those behemoths? Of course you're gonna form alliances.
So basically someone is running a script iterates over the whole ipv4 range and calls the claim endpoint with each single adress in the X-Forwared-For http header once.
It used to be possible back in the days when sequence numbers were easily guessable. (You'd obviously not be able to receive, only send, so you couldn't do TLS, but TLS had hardly been invented at the time.) Now operating systems are way too good for that. :-)
I spent an hour playing it! It is quite good.
Is there a source code available for this game?