One wonder what the point is of filing fake publications for somebody else. It could be that the magazine is scamming libraries? Or perhaps a vindictive colleague?
1. Steal, increase credibility for the article and the (assumed) real authors by attaching the name of a successful researcher with high credibility. People need to publish a number of papers to get their degree. Doing this may help them getting published easiser. A bit like also stealing the actual contents of the paper from an already published paper.
2. Destroy the credibility of a researcher by attaching their name to a paper that is falsified, plagiarized.
My very unfounded guess is that it is more (1) than (2) at play here. But research in political science is probably more at risk to cause anger and enemies than say cosmology. Unless the research is related to dwarf planets or some such.
Another possibility would be to prop-up a fake journal/conference cycle, which is used by some interest groups to publish and thus "validate" dishonest research which then goes toward their own business/political interests.
Think "money laundering", but for scholarly credentials.
There is a very interesting DEFCON talk[1] called "Inside the fake science factory" about this.
I've actually seen this before, interestingly also involving specifically-African entities and a Russian native.
As best I could tell, it was being exploited as a form of identity theft. I think it's what the kids informally call "skinwalking" (when they do it to each other on Instagram for likes or other social currency).
Professionally, the scheme starts with finding a credible individual whose reputation you need to hijack, so a career researcher or someone that's been publishing papers for 20 years but nowadays is not as active. In this case, the impersonator emigrated to a new country and renamed himself on the naturalization paperwork so his name was identical to the target's (a former oil exec in this case-- let's call him Oily Man).
At that point, you start pretending to be active in the target's domain. Start publishing papers as Oily Man. Start going to conferences as Oily Man and wearing your name badge conspicuously. People that only recognize the name will mistake you for the real one and strike up insider conversations-- and remember seeing "Oily Man" at the conference. People suspicious of you that know the real guy, you explain away as mistaken identity of two individuals who happen to work in the same space (there's no expectation of disambiguation; you had no choice in what your parents named you, right?).
The result is that anybody that googles Oily Man finds a 20+ year work history, a bunch of papers "he's" currently written, and a bunch of conferences "he's" recently attended. You're basically finishing someone else's life story. Since the real Oily Man is retired/inactive, there's no chance of crossing paths with him, and since you're not claiming to be him, there's little consequence even if you do. It's everyone else's fault for conflating the two of you!
There was a very specific purpose to this scheme that culminated in the impersonator using the target's identity (and others!) to secure a seat on a particular board to (I surmise) fraudulently cast votes on a particular subject, but I can't disclose the details of that.
I understand the original article that was plagiarized was quoted in the paper. Maybe the authors of that article wanted to bring attention to it and needed someone else to validate their work.
[+] [-] nodomain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isaacfrond|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoachimS|2 years ago|reply
1. Steal, increase credibility for the article and the (assumed) real authors by attaching the name of a successful researcher with high credibility. People need to publish a number of papers to get their degree. Doing this may help them getting published easiser. A bit like also stealing the actual contents of the paper from an already published paper.
2. Destroy the credibility of a researcher by attaching their name to a paper that is falsified, plagiarized.
My very unfounded guess is that it is more (1) than (2) at play here. But research in political science is probably more at risk to cause anger and enemies than say cosmology. Unless the research is related to dwarf planets or some such.
[+] [-] mablopoule|2 years ago|reply
There is a very interesting DEFCON talk[1] called "Inside the fake science factory" about this.
[1] https://youtu.be/ras_VYgA77Q
[+] [-] jstarfish|2 years ago|reply
As best I could tell, it was being exploited as a form of identity theft. I think it's what the kids informally call "skinwalking" (when they do it to each other on Instagram for likes or other social currency).
Professionally, the scheme starts with finding a credible individual whose reputation you need to hijack, so a career researcher or someone that's been publishing papers for 20 years but nowadays is not as active. In this case, the impersonator emigrated to a new country and renamed himself on the naturalization paperwork so his name was identical to the target's (a former oil exec in this case-- let's call him Oily Man).
At that point, you start pretending to be active in the target's domain. Start publishing papers as Oily Man. Start going to conferences as Oily Man and wearing your name badge conspicuously. People that only recognize the name will mistake you for the real one and strike up insider conversations-- and remember seeing "Oily Man" at the conference. People suspicious of you that know the real guy, you explain away as mistaken identity of two individuals who happen to work in the same space (there's no expectation of disambiguation; you had no choice in what your parents named you, right?).
The result is that anybody that googles Oily Man finds a 20+ year work history, a bunch of papers "he's" currently written, and a bunch of conferences "he's" recently attended. You're basically finishing someone else's life story. Since the real Oily Man is retired/inactive, there's no chance of crossing paths with him, and since you're not claiming to be him, there's little consequence even if you do. It's everyone else's fault for conflating the two of you!
There was a very specific purpose to this scheme that culminated in the impersonator using the target's identity (and others!) to secure a seat on a particular board to (I surmise) fraudulently cast votes on a particular subject, but I can't disclose the details of that.
[+] [-] Maken|2 years ago|reply
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