NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

OMB's focus on NIH and NSF, which has confused a lot of folks, pretty much boils down to stopping money going to universities.

Looks like you went down the same rabbit hole I did - it goes deep!

Yes this was one of the sham societies we investigated as part of the network! The same person uploaded the doctored RASNZ picture to Google Maps also uploaded the doctored European Academy of Engineering one we report on in the story

Yes this was one of the sham societies we investigated as part of the network! The same person uploaded the doctored RASNZ picture to Google Maps also uploaded the doctored European Academy of Engineering one we report on in the story

This thread only skims the surface of some of the juicy details we uncovered in this investigation. The full article is below. If you hit a paywall, make a free account. Have experiences with these orgs, or have another investigation I should pursue? My Signal is mkozlov.01.

The bottom line? Academics have to contend with predatory journals, shoddy conferences, and now "deepfake prestige", as one of my sources called it. AI tools are only turbocharging this behavior and making it harder than ever to detect. Just as fast as one website goes down, another 10 can launch.

The deception ran so deep it fooled major institutions. Dozens of top universities published press releases celebrating these fake honors, and the US National Academies of Sciences even sent a newsletter to its members, congratulating 51 of them on being elected to the EAE.

But how did elite scientists get misled to join in the first place? Rice University's Moshe Vardi told me he overlooked red flags—like a distorted, seemingly AI-edited photo—because he saw his scientific idols listed as fellow award winners. He candidly admitted: "Ego played a role".

In July, UC Berkeley's Michael Jordan demanded to be removed from NAAI after it started charging fees. Fees are "not what a professional society should be about," he tells me. Instead, the society falsely listed him as a featured speaker at an October conference charging up to $600 for attendance.

Why go through the trouble? To sell credentials to early- and mid-career researchers, particularly in China, it appears. Educational-policy specialist Fan Xiudi told me China's hyper-competitive research system relies heavily on honorary titles, creating a lucrative market for these sham groups.

The deception starts by misleading prominent scientists into lending their credibility. Columbia computer scientist Julia Hirschberg was thrilled to be elected to the European Academy of Engineering. Then she saw the EAE website and found she was listed as the chairperson—a job she never accepted.

We uncovered a sprawling network of sham academies using digitally manipulated photos, plagiarized content and scientists' identities without their consent eg The "European Academy of Engineering", supposedly headquarted in Sweden, was actually using a doctored photo of the University of Gothenburg