Fired postdoc faked recommendation letters from supervisor, OSU alleges

A major research institution has accused a former postdoc of forging letters of recommendation from a supervisor, according to a court complaint. 

Georgios Laliotis was terminated by The Ohio State University on Nov. 30, 2021, according to the complaint filed in Franklin County Municipal Court, which we’ve made available here. Earlier that month, his PI, cancer researcher Philip Tsichlis, had uncovered manipulated data in two papers on which Laliotis was the first author, and emailed journal editors to retract them, as we previously reported. 

Emails released to us by OSU following a public records request indicated that Laliotis had been working at Johns Hopkins at the time, but OSU staffers had been told he had resigned his position effective November 24 and would go back to Greece. Whether he was employed by both universities simultaneously is unclear. 

In the complaint and supporting affidavit, an OSU police detective alleges that Laliotis created a fake Microsoft Outlook email address with Tsichlis’ name and used it to send letters of recommendation purportedly from Tsichlis to prospective employers on two occasions in December. 

Someone at one of those entities, named in the complaint as Revirtx, thought the Outlook email address was fishy, and contacted Tsichlis to verify the letter. 

Tsichlis “suspected Laliotis was sending out forged reference letters and worried that his reputation and that of Ohio State University could be negatively affected.” He reported the matter to OSU police, the detective alleges in the affidavit. 

The OSU detective described his investigation, which involved executing a search warrant for Microsoft Outlook data and a subpoena on Google: 

The original email header was obtained from the Revirtx representative, and a search warrant was obtained for subscriber information and email content belonging to the [email protected] account. The victim [Tsichlis] also verified that he has no outlook email account. The returned search warrant result showed that an email account known to be associated with Laliotis – [email protected] – was linked to the subscriber information for the outlook account. This led your affiant to believe the outlook email account was fraudulent. Investigative subpoena results from Google provided more verifiable information that Laliotis registered for and utilized the [email protected] email account for regular correspondence and linked that same email to credit cards and other options offered by Google, Google Pay, and other similar features. An investigative subpoena was sent to a rental company in Baltimore, MD which verified the current lease address for Laliotis; and that he utilized the [email protected] account as a point of contact.

IP (Internet Protocol) address information was also gleaned from the original Revirtx email header, from another email sent by Laliotis to an institution of higher education in Pennsylvania, and from the Google/Gmail subpoena, Microsoft Outlook search warrant, and digital signatures from the lease agreement signed by Laliotis. Those IP addresses and other data were analyzed by the OSU Internet Security Team. The data suggest that an identical IP address was used on more than one occasion for both the [email protected] address and the [email protected] address. One of those instances was within 7 minutes of each other and fell within the timeline the forged emails were sent.

The complaint and supporting affidavit were filed on July 13, 2022, and a warrant was issued for Laliotis’ arrest, with instructions to contact the OSU police. 

Neither Laliotis nor Tsichlis has responded to our requests for comment.

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