I don't use to involve myself to any free giveaway in this community, because that is the best strategy scammers used to convinced people from the community to scam their coins, which is what was about to happen to you, but you noticed some scam plan that make you to escaped from the scammers. Thank you for sharing it in this community for those beginners looking for shortcut to earn coins to know that there are scammers in the community using that strategy, and this information will help them to avoid them when they come across such in the future. I know that the scammers will come up with new strategy in this community, but they will definitely be expose again because people understand their strategy very well.
We should avoid joining airdrop or other programs that require us to deposit first to reach the withdrawal amount, this case is clearly a scam but many victims, even though the fraud method is classic and outdated, are too obsessed with high withdrawal amounts and they don't realize they have been deceived. so they will wait for the withdrawal process to be successful, even though the project party does not transfer any withdrawals and they only want to steal the customer's money that has been deposited.
That's not airdrop anymore if there's minimum deposit involve since we can call that as investment. People should avoid to get fooled in that schemes since this action is usually made up by scammers. If they are interested with airdrops they should participate on legitimate programs which doesn't required their money especially their private key. This scheme is not new and there's a lot of post or articles posted to warn people regarding on this methods used by scammers so hopefully they take time to research before participating on anything they are not familiar.
Legitimate airdrops only require people to do some task for them and no other thing that can cause people harm. If they found out that the one they see is risky, better leave so they could able to save their money and effort on those scams.