By Tim Devaney and Tom Stein of allBusiness. Excerpt:
"Most people often throw away the receipt after withdrawing cash from an ATM. John de Lisle is one fellow who values ATM printouts — not because he got millions printed on his bank statement — but because he earns a four-digit annual income from his hobby printing fake bank receipts.
It all began in 2004 when he saw a thermal ATM receipt printer on eBay for sale. “Interfacing it with my PC would make an interesting electronic project … it would be fun to see what people would want to print on a receipt,’ he says.
Initially he got requests from people who apparently wanted to use the invoice for insurance fraud, so he placed safeguards by using fake bank names, fraudulent numbers, and false terminal numbers.
The safeguards are sufficient for experts to detect the receipts are not genuine. But it appears real enough for practical jokers to pull a stunt on friends, relatives, and even new acquaintances they want to impress.
His clients — mostly males between the ages 20 to 40 — agree that it often works. After dropping hints of extra wealth, thanks to $250,000 ATM receipts, they often get dates or nocturnal conquests from women who are attracted to someone apparently filthy rich."
Related posts:
People are hiring out their faces to become deepfake-style marketing clones
Why would men bring fake cell phones to bars?
Are sellers paying Amazon customers to delete negative reviews?
Fake Reviews and Inflated Ratings Are Still a Problem for Amazon
The Myth of Authenticity Or The Story Behind Products
Students: Make a mistake on purpose, its good for you!
A fake job reference can be just a few clicks away.
Fake Economist Fools Portugal.
Slave Redemption in Sudan. (Fake slaves are sold to those who buy slaves and then give them their freedom)
Can A Product Work Just Because It's Expensive?. (fake medicine)
If It Pays To Have Friends, Can You Pay To Have Friends?. (you can hire fake boyfriends)
Study: Half of American Doctors Give Patients Placebos Without Telling Them.
Saudis grapple with fake street sweepers .
Rent a White Guy: Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing (by Mitch Moxley in The Atlantic Monthly, excerpts below)
Can adding a phantom third story to their homes help families find a wife for their son?
Why do employers pay extra money to people who study a bunch of subjects in college that they don’t actually need you to know? Signaling
Mexicans buy fake cellphones to hand over in muggings
Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!)
How does a company selling used luxury goods spot fakes? (signalling and conspicuous consumption).
Why do stores sometimes pay people to be fake shoppers?
What if companies can't afford real models for their ads? Use AI generated fake pictures
Excerpts from "Rent a White Guy"
"Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made."
"For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist."
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