I also heard the story of a digital agency that rented a huge space, painted the walls with bright colors and hired a bunch of actors to pose as employees. The idea was to deceive and close a deal with a potential big client that insisted in visiting their offices.
As a student I was hired as a temp for a 1 day contract. When I arrived they were just setting up the open plan office. We were asked to bring laptops and given stacks of paper and a phone, and told to work though the files, calling the numbers.
It was weird to recieve little training for what seemed to be an investigator type role.
Mid way though the day a bunch of suits arrived, toured the office, and went into a meeting. Later they left and we were told to go home.
Clearly we were faking something, maybe an inflated company sale or a bid for a contract.
The wierd thing was, the stacks of paper were real classified police files, with genuine contents (we were phoning people).
Uh, a good friend of mine did that a couple of years ago when he started a new design agency. He was going for a large government contract and they insisted on an in-house meeting as part of the pre-tender process.
He had a large office space already, in preparation for growth, but only 1 employee at that stage, so he got his high school aged daughter in, as well as some of her friends to sit in the empty desks and pretend to work. A couple of the PC's at the back facing away from the meeting room weren't even plugged in, and were just screens on the desk and keyboards attached to nothing.
It worked - he got the contract, and as a result, now has REAL employees at those stations, and in fact has to look at a bigger space to expand into.
That reminds me of a 19th century con man I read about in the wonderful book "Bloodletters and Badmen: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals from the Pilgrims to the Present" [1].
He came to some big city posing as a successful businessman seeking investors for some new enterprise. He would give as a reference the president of a local bank located on the other side of town.
When the potential investors went to that bank to check out the reference, they found a busy, well equipped, and well furnished bank, full of well dressed obviously upper class clients conducting business. When they spoke to the President and other officers all they heard was praise for the honesty and business skills of the con man. The marks would then make a large investment.
When the con man left town with their money and they realized something was wrong, and then went to the bank to try to find out what was going on, they found an empty building with a "for lease" sign, and many of the people they had seen as customers and employees in the bank were now seen to be beggars, prostitutes, and such from the neighborhood that the con man had hired to play customers and employees.
Back when his agency was a one man band, a friend pointed out that one advantage of a trendy shared workspace is that nobody ever asked how many of the people they saw in 'his' corner actually worked for him.
I've also met people who've earned temp "work" in China being nothing more than white faces in the background to make the company look international to visitors
I keep hearing this about Chinese companies but I've never actually met someone who has done this or have any concrete example beyond "oh I've heard that people do that", and I've talked to a lot of white expats in China. You've actually met these people? Did they explain any other details?
I ran into an old friend at my brother's wedding who was recently back from Beijing. He studied there and was put onto the rowing team without much active choice on his part. He took occasional jobs for a few hours as the western guy. He'd get picked up and given a briefcase to hold. Sometimes he'd be taken on a tour of a factory. Sometimes it was his job to take something out of the briefcase and give it to someone. At least once his employer was a local police officer. He said that the impression he had was that he was evidence of working with some overseas company.
Villain du jour, Cambridge Analytica changed their name and rented a office in Cambridge filled with London based employees to win over the intellectual Steve Bannon
Even within this well-educated microclimate, the irony in that statement might not be clear enough to everyone.
May I suggest either crystal clear irony ("the most eminent intellectual of our times Steve Bannon") or a more accurate description ("the racist firebrand Steve Bannon")?
