In February 2022, Kristen Tripphahn took a job as chief operating officer at Op4G, a market-research firm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Op4G's product was simple: it recruited a panel of ordinary people and sold their honest answers to clients trying to understand consumers, patients, and voters. Six months in, Tripphahn discovered that the panel Op4G had been selling for years was not entirely made of people who existed.
Federal prosecutors would later allege the fraud began in 2014, when senior Op4G leaders decided the fastest way to grow revenue was to stop finding real respondents and start manufacturing them. They recruited paid workers the company internally called "ants": people coached on how to answer a survey's screening questions to qualify, how long to linger on each page so the timestamps looked human, and to route their connections through VPNs so one fake respondent couldn't be traced back to a single machine. In 2018 several of Op4G's employees and founders moved the fake-data business to a second company, Slice. By the years just before the scheme collapsed, investigators found, fabricated answers accounted for roughly 90 percent of the two companies' revenue.
Op4G and Slice billed more than $10 million for tainted data between 2014 and early 2025, to at least 64 clients investigators later named, among them Google, Seattle Children's Hospital, and universities from Northwestern to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One client was David Victorson, a Northwestern psychologist who had used an Op4G panel in a National Institutes of Health-funded project to build a standardized measure of mindfulness. When the indictment became public in April 2025, he called the FBI agent on the case, who told him plainly: some of his data was real, some wasn't, and there was no way now to tell which. He and his colleagues were about to submit their primary paper. They stopped everything, collected the whole study again, and reanalyzed it from scratch; the main findings held, though the numbers moved.
Tripphahn's own account of the discovery, published the following month, put the core of it in one sentence: she had believed Op4G was doing some good in the world, and found six months in that nothing could have been further from the truth. What she had found was not one lie but an entire business's founding promise, hollowed out. A survey exists to stand in for a fact too large to check directly — what a thousand consumers actually think, what a hospital's patients actually feel — and every decision built on it, a marketing budget, a drug's positioning, a federal grant's conclusion, inherits whatever was true or false in the sample underneath. Fake the sample and the fraud doesn't announce itself. It sits under everything built afterward, indistinguishable from the real thing, until someone is finally forced to ask and gets the answer nobody wants: unknowable.
A market-research firm that fabricates its panel has not cut a corner. It has stopped being the thing its invoice says it is. Every field that leans on a sample to speak for a population it cannot fully survey — psychology, medicine, public health, marketing — is making the same bet Victorson made: that the row of numbers in front of it came from where it claims. For a decade, for at least 64 institutions, that bet was a coin flip nobody knew they were taking.