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2. "About 15 years ago, I was hired to assist with an inventory and appraisal of the wine collection of a guy who lived in the Caribbean and ran a bank there, specializing in selling long-term, high-yield CDs. I went down and spent a week doing that and spending time with him and some of his very few employees, none of whom seemed to do very much work at all. As soon as I got back, I set up Google alerts for the guy's name and Ponzi scheme."
"A month later, it started going off; he'd been indicted, assets frozen, fled in his private jet, and eventually got picked up at a cheap motel in Canada.
A year or so after that, I got interviewed by the FBI, mostly questions to establish who of his 'employees' I met and about his lifestyle (presumably to try to make a tax fraud case, although they ended up just getting him on Ponzi charges)."
12. "Recently, I dated this guy. Right before we broke up, he started acting odd. Distant. Less affectionate. He initially told me he was going through a lot mentally: issues with work, his car, his baby mama. He wanted to change his living situation. He was overwhelmed, but he insisted that he still absolutely adored me and that I was an absolute angel and a constant source of peace in his life. Okay. Fine. He continued pulling back. My gut was telling me something was just absolutely not right. There was something missing."
"His baby mama blew him up at one point, and I overheard her say something along the lines of, 'This is a betrayal of trust.' When questioned about it, he tried saying it was just because he texted a female friend, consoling her because she lost her mom. My alarm bells were going off.
Why is your baby mama upset about that? Why is that considered a betrayal of trust? There's no way this is just her 'being crazy' because this woman was perfectly fine with us dating and has been nothing but a sweetheart to me, but suddenly, she was up in arms over him doing something as innocent as consoling a friend who lost her mom.
Anyway, I finally asked him if things were really okay between him and me. He tells me that he just thinks things aren't stable enough for him to have a relationship at the moment and that he doesn't have the mental energy to give me the attention I deserve. Fine. We leave it amicable and go our separate ways.
I still had a feeling in my stomach. Something wasn't right. Right before he started acting weird, he told me that he had wanted to be with me for a very long time, that he thought we were perfect together, and that he loved me. If you love someone and you're that serious about them, I'd think that even if you're going through tough times, you'd lean on them or want them around, right?
Less than a month later, guess what? I found out that the girl he was consoling was indeed his new girlfriend."
18. "There was someone roughly in my PhD cohort who worked a few labs down the hall from me. They always seemed to get positive results with no protocol troubleshooting, and the results were always the sort of thing that journal editors looked fondly upon. Somehow, this person was twice as productive as even the super smart, 60-plus hour week working, creative grad students in other labs. This person won pretty much every graduate and postdoc award you could get and ended up a professor at a well-regarded university with a huge startup grant."
"A year into their faculty position, their former postdoc lab, upon being unable to repeat any experiments or build on the data, figured out that the person had fabricated or fudged at least 60% of results that had been published in top-tier journals.
We're talking outright fabrication, not just a slightly too contrast-enhanced micrograph or blot. They reported this to the funding agencies, and there was a full investigation. They lost their grants, and the university fired them.
It turns out a similar thing happened when I talked to someone in the person's PhD lab. Some really questionable Western blots had been overly processed and cropped in ways that were definitely misleading. At least one Master's student burned a year trying to build on that work and got nowhere.
It turns out that one of the golden children of my PhD program and someone who was featured by funding agencies as the next big thing had built their scientific career mostly on lies, and it took 10 years for anyone to really catch on.
There are some really great scientists who just happen to land on fruitful projects, but no one is that productive and lucky all the time."
English (US) 