Decade-long fraud by market survey firm a ‘gut punch’ for researchers

In April 2025, a psychologist at Northwestern University, David Victorson, was preparing manuscripts for submission when he received a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. The indictment indicated that Op4G, a market research company he had worked with for over a decade, was being indicted for fraudulently billing $10 million for non-existent market survey data.

Victorson's initial skepticism was further confirmed when he used Op4G to conduct an online survey for a National Institutes of Health project on mindfulness. He subsequently discarded the data, as the period of the indictment had passed. The fallout from the fraud led researchers at several institutions in the United States to review and correct or update their published and unpublished studies.

The Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology retracted a 2023 study on social media's role in supporting young adults with cancer, citing the authors' loss of confidence in the conclusions drawn from fraudulent data. Other studies have not been updated promptly. Stacey Tessler Lindau, a physician-scientist at the University of Chicago, used Op4G to collect data from 3,200 respondents during the COVID-19 pandemic, but she declined to comment on her data's validity.

Op4G, founded in 2010, claimed to pay survey participants in cash and split a portion with their favorite non-profit organizations. However, prosecutors revealed that the company fabricated data by having employees and their friends and family take surveys or recruit bogus participants from various countries. The scheme involved mixing legitimate data with fabricated "ant farm" data.

In 2018, several Op4G employees and founders shifted their fraudulent business to a new company, Slice MR. An internal whistleblower, Kristen Tripphahn, exposed the fraud after joining Op4G as chief operating officer in 2022. Op4G's two founders, Frank Hayden and Ryan Stoudt, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Victorson, who had previously worked with Op4G, expressed his disappointment at the personal connections he had with the perpetrators.