In April 2025, David Victorson, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, was polishing several manuscripts for submission when a colleague sent him a link to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. “Eight Defendants Indicted in International Conspiracy to Bill $10 Million for Fraudulent Market Survey Data,” the headline read.
Victorson couldn’t believe it. Op4G, a market research company he first worked with more than a decade earlier, was being indicted for selling bogus data between 2014 and 2023. In fact, Victorson had just used them to run an online survey related to meditation as part of a U.S. National Institutes of Health project to create a standardized mindfulness metric. He didn’t yet know whether his own data were compromised, but he knew there was no way he’d be submitting his manuscripts with those data.
“Because they were within the period of the indictment, we scrapped them entirely,” Victorson said. “It took years off our lives.”
In the aftermath of the revelations about the fraud, researchers at a half dozen institutions inside the United States have been scrambling to review and correct or update their published studies and unpublished manuscripts.
In June, The Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology retracted a 2023 study on the role of social media in supporting young adults with cancer, after the authors notified it of their concerns.
“While the authors note that they conclusively infer that fraudulent data was provided to them, they have lost confidence in the conclusions drawn and requested retraction of the article,” the editors wrote in the retraction notice. The lead author, Allison Lazard, a professor of media studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, did not respond to a request for comment.
Other studies have not been updated swiftly. Stacey Tessler Lindau, a physician-scientist at the University of Chicago, was part of a team that used Op4G to collect data from 3,200 respondents for two studies they conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lindau did not respond directly to Retraction Watch about whether she remained confident in her data, but she passed our message on to Jeremy Manier, associate vice president for communications and public affairs, who wrote that “If any retractions or corrections associated with the use of that data are appropriate, those steps will be taken.”
Op4G, which stands for “Opinions for Good” was founded in 2010 with what sounded like an admirable mission: Survey participants would receive cash payment split between them and their favorite non-profit organizations.
Because recruiting subjects to meet the requirements for certain projects could be challenging, the company’s founders soon came up with a scheme to generate fabricated data for the clients, according to prosecutors. Employees and their friends and family members would sometimes take the surveys themselves for payment, or they would recruit bogus survey participants from the United States, Serbia, India and Brazil, who they dubbed “ants.” Court records indicate that legitimate survey data were often mixed with their “ant farm” data — a process they dubbed “scrambling the eggs.”
In 2018, several Op4G employees and founders decided to move their fake-data business to a new company, Slice MR. The scheme finally unraveled thanks to an internal whistleblower, Kristen Tripphahn, who joined Op4G as chief operating officer in February 2022.
“I, like many others, believed Op4G was all about doing some good in this world, but I discovered 6 months in that nothing could have been further from the truth,” she wrote in a Substack post. (Tripphahn declined our request to comment.)
Although the majority of the two firms’ clients were companies conducting traditional market research, the list of victims filed in court by prosecutors includes a number of hospitals and universities, including Northwestern, University of Maryland, Wake Forest, University of North Carolina and Northwell Health in New York.
Victorson, whose work focuses on patient-reported outcome measures, first used Op4G to conduct an online survey related to prostate cancer in 2013 and was pleased with the quality of the data. Because those data were acquired prior to the period outlined in the indictment and there are no obvious red flags, he has no reason to question their validity.
However, in 2020, he hired the firm for his recent NIH study on mindfulness. He declined to disclose the exact cost of running the survey. When Victorson learned of the fraud, he immediately called the FBI agent involved in the case, hoping to learn more. While not all of the data were fake, the agent told him, there was no way to know for sure how badly his own data was tainted.
“We were just about to publish our primary paper based on those data when we found out about this, and we stopped everything,” he said. “We have since re-collected all the data and re-analyzed all the data.” Remarkably, he said, the main findings still stand even though the numbers have changed slightly.
For Victorson, the worst part of the fraud was that he knew the perpetrators personally. Frank Hayden, the chief operating officer for the survey firm, lived in his town, Evanston, Illinois. The vice president for sales, Ryan Stoudt, stopped in to grab burgers and talk about football when he was visiting. Both men have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (Stoudt did not respond to a request for comment, and Hayden could not be reached.)
“It’s such a gut punch,” Victorson said. “There are a lot of things that suck about this, but one of the harder things is that it’s not just like someone took my credit card number and bought gas in Minnesota.”
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