The $8,000 Podcast Slot: Pay-to-Play Shows and the Manufactured Audience
Download farms, network-number shuffles, and referral mills — how pay-to-play podcasting sells audiences that do not exist, and the three-listener test.
Scams
Fake Forbes/marketplace placements, PR fraud, phantom newsrooms — exposed with documents
Letters From a Newsroom That Doesn't Exist: The Spoofed-Media Phishing Economy
Credential capture, invoice spoofing, weaponized attachments — how fake newsroom emails exploit the fastest repliers in any company, and the verification discipline that stops them.
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.
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.