The research team placed announcements on social media for a paid, online discussion group to inform research on parenting disabled kids. Shortly after, 20 individuals responded, with seemingly diverse ethnic backgrounds, all located in study’s geographic limits.
Something wasn’t right. It was too fast, too easy. The team soon realized that likely all 20 of the interested participants had misrepresented their identities to qualify for the study and receive the stipend. They were frauds—otherwise known as “imposter respondents”.
As we move towards more virtual focus groups in qualitative health research, we’re seeing an avalanche of imposter respondents that pose a clear threat to research integrity. Researchers have been raising the alarm and trying to educate on how to detect and remove these phonies. But as I discovered in a recent project, sussing out the fakers is harder than it looks.
What’s happening? And how bad is it?
Imposter respondents mislead researchers by faking their identities in order to collect payment for online focus groups and surveys. They typically troll social media like Facebook for paid studies, then lie to meet requirements. They often claim they can’t use their camera during Zoom sessions and they engage very little, if at all. Many also have special requests to be paid in international gift cards—and they may be extremely persistent for payment, even just hours after a session has finished.
Damian Ridge and colleagues wrote a concise analysis of the problem in “Imposter Participants in online qualitative research” in 2023. Around the same time, Elizabeth Pellicano and colleagues also covered the phenomenon in the neuroscience sector in a letter to the editor of Journal of the National Autistic Society, entitled “A possible threat to data integrity for online qualitative autism research”.
We have recently been involved in three studies in which we had in-depth discussions with autistic people and/or parents of autistic children about various topics. It turns out, though, that some of these participants were not genuine. Instead, we believe they were “scammer participants”: people posing as autistic people or parents of autistic children, possibly to gain money from doing the research.
Perhaps the most stunning report was a 2024 paper by Pakhi Sharma and colleagues, “Navigating the challenges of imposter participants in online qualitative research: lessons learned from a paediatric health services study”. The team specifically studied the imposters that had attempted to take part in their focus group for “carers of Australian children with neurodevelopmental disorders.”
Amazingly, after weeding out more than a hundred obvious fakes, all 20 of the remaining group were determined during focus groups to be fraudulent!
Interest in participation was unexpectedly high. We determined that all potential participants were likely imposters, posing as multiple individuals and using different IP addresses across Nigeria, Australia, and the United States. [emphasis added.]
Red flags
Sharma’s team identified several red flags for imposter respondents. These include: “large volumes and strange timings of email responses; unlikely demographic characteristics; short or vague interviews; a preference for non-visual participation; fixation on monetary compensation…”
The team noted many special requests from participants to be paid in formats which can be remitted internationally and claimed to be Aboriginal at a rate much higher than statistically expected. The researchers also noticed participant IP addresses did not come from Australia, where the team was recruiting from.
Pellicano identified many of the same red flags, observing that “booking data suggested participants were based in countries different from those they said they were based,” “an abundance of participants claim[ed] to be from highly underrepresented groups (whom we were often purposively sampling)” and that imposter participants made “more frequent-than-usual enquiries about payments, including the timing and type of voucher offered.”
Who’s running these scams?
I co-run a non-profit and recently led a small focus group to assist a larger group doing health-related qualitative research in Canada. We put out an initial call for participants on several platforms, including our public Facebook page. Not long after the Facebook notice was posted, my organization’s inbox was filled with emails from supposedly eligible people.
Of the 34 emails, about 20 were extremely long, florid and awkward--the hallmark of a novice Chat GTP user. We deleted those immediately. The non-AI responses were then screened with a series of individual emails asking people to state the province they lived in and confirm their ages and availability.
Potential participants who answered these emails were then required to take a brief demographic survey prior to the focus groups. This sussed out two additional frauds. Both had identified Canada as their home in emails and in the demographic survey—but the back end of the survey platform showed their responses coming from outside Canada. Yet another participant showed no location data…but he had emailed that he was in Alberta.
Hm.
The day of the focus group he logged on without his camera and never contributed, even when we reached out directly in the chat. He then barraged us with requests for payments hours after the session ended. His PayPal info led to a suspended account, under a different (female) name; when I informed him, he asked for an international gift card. He then emailed us for updates 9 times in the span of 2 days. This made us wonder if he was working alone—or if he had a boss pressuring him to fill a quota.
Are imposter respondents just random individuals playing the system, or is there someone else pressuring them in their fakery, then taking the lion’s share of payments?
A departure from the virtual
In the before times, qualitative research was often face-to-face. Participants got coffee, cookies and maybe a gift card (usually in a token amount). It was a whole social thing—an evening, at the least. Now, as the research world has become both more saturated and more virtual, we are more vulnerable to scams.
We can work around the problem through various strategies…sure. But if the game of all this has you feeling down, you’re not alone. The phenomenon of imposter respondents reveals the grim shadow of the anonymized online world. It’s a reminder of why we need to meet up, shake hands and touch grass whenever we possibly can.
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