Your Press Kit Is a Product — and Someone Is Reselling It
Asset-dressed clones, broker-resold brand kits, and fee-gated 'media audits': three schemes that monetize the most under-protected asset a company owns.
Scams
Fake Forbes/marketplace placements, PR fraud, phantom newsrooms — exposed with documents
The Fake Journalist Playbook: Interview Bait, Paywalled 'Features,' and Stolen Bylines
AI made the press costume cheap. Three documented variants — placement fees, intelligence harvests, and sold journalist profiles — and the masthead checks that break all of them.
Dark PR's Fraud Economy: Ghost Retainers, Double Sales, and the Fabricated Dossier
Paid hit-campaigns occupy PR's gray zone — and attract operators who sell attacks they never run, then monetize the fear they created. The court-recorded patterns, reconstructed.
Fake Wire Services: Paying for Distribution to a Network That Exists Only in Your Report
The $395 'national distribution' that costs nothing to deliver: how counterfeit newswires build reports instead of reach — and the traceability checks that expose them.
Virality Packages: The $7,900 Bundle That Costs Under $1,000 to Deliver
Tiered 'virality' packages sell an outcome nobody can guarantee, using a cost stack investigators can reconstruct line by line.
The 'Guaranteed Forbes Placement' Machine: How Clone Mastheads Sell What They Don't Own
Inside the guaranteed-placement economy: lookalike domains, rented contributor memberships, and the 90-second check founders never run before wiring five figures.