
A Well-Known Expert on Student Loans Is Not Real - cpeterso
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Drew-Cloud-Is-a-Well-Known/243217
======
barbegal
In 2017 they were claiming to be founded in 2015 [1] and didn't disclose that
they were affiliated with financial companies. A few days ago [2] they were
claiming to be founded in 2016 and disclosed that they were affiliated with
financial companies.

The fake expert is not that concerning but providing affiliate links with no
disclosure is a real concern and is rife across the internet and growing [3].
Obviously this company came clean once the journalists got onto them.

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170610022155/https://studentlo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170610022155/https://studentloans.net/about-
contact/)

[2]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180420191847/https://studentlo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180420191847/https://studentloans.net/about-
contact/)

[3]
[https://blog.marketing.rakuten.com/hubfs/Networks_Help_Drive...](https://blog.marketing.rakuten.com/hubfs/Networks_Help_Drive_Affiliate_Marketing_Into_The_Mainstream.pdf)

~~~
woodrowbarlow
do you find affiliate links more evil than a company being able to
significantly manipulate how the media reports on the industry they profit
from?

~~~
bhhaskin
Isn't that just shoddy journalism on the part of media that reported and
quoted them? We shouldn't shift the blame from the media companies that
reported fake information as fact. We are never going to get rid of fake
information. We can only push for journalistic standards to ensure we aren't
bringing credibility and legitimacy to a company pumping out this crap.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Identity checks are incredibly time consuming and expensive. Many authors
deliberately use pseudonyms.

The only practical way to avoid what you’re calling “shoddy journalism” would
be to have a single international register of vetted and accredited blog
authors.

Is that really an outcome you want?

~~~
admax88q
Or perhaps journalists could actually do some investigative reporting rather
than treating blog posts as even a potential source of truth.

~~~
PurpleBoxDragon
Are people willing to pay them commensurate to the extra work they will have
to put in to do this?

------
eugene_chen
This fabrication is by the folks behind LendEDU (YC W16).

~~~
kolpa
Dishonesty "when it doesn't matter, in the eye of the investor" is a YC
requirement:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html)

""" Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to
have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good.
Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about
observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil.
They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what
question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us
discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked
something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not
breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most
attention to when judging applications. """

~~~
badcede
That's not a requirement, what it describes is not dishonesty, nor does it use
that word. Nor does the phrase you put in quotation marks appear in the essay.
Who's being dishonest here?

~~~
blackbagboys
In practice, this is what breaking 'rules that don't matter' looks like - you
break the rules that don't matter _to you_ , but those rules were probably put
in place for a reason.

~~~
hailk
> but those rules were probably put in place for a reason.

Assuming that lawmaking systems are altruistic and incapable of folly. In
practice that doesn't work

~~~
kbenson
> Assuming that lawmaking systems are altruistic and incapable of folly.

As opposed to assuming all those that will individually assess and decide what
rules are worth following won't diverge in "interesting" (read as dangerous
and life-threatening) ways occasionally as the inexperienced, the unethical,
or the just plain stupid make choices we would all rather as a society they
not.

~~~
hailk
Nope. It's not as black and white. Following the laws to the book, but not
being afraid of breaking the law in itself, but being afraid of crossing
ethical lines and understanding the cost of breaking the law, willfully
accepting what retribution comes back when caught. There has to be some level
of human conscience at play in these decision making. There are hundreds of
laws that are enforced while ethical lines are being crossed and laws are
broken without crossing any. All we can ask as a society is that we train and
employ our rationality and conscience.

------
mrleiter
If it can be proven that LendEDU or any other student loan company profited
from their statements, this is a picture case of wire fraud. 18 U.S.C. §1343
[1] for reference, states that "whoever devised or intended to devise any
scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property _by means of
false or fraudulent pretenses, representations_ [...]"

They did not disclose their connection to LendEDU and if LendEDU profited from
their fraudulent pretenses or representations then there you have it.

[1]
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343)

~~~
shaki-dora
I’m not sure... Any actor in a commercial technically falls under that
definition.

~~~
larkeith
Would that count as "false or fraudulent pretenses"? It seems like the fact
that it's a commercial serves as an indicator that the consumer displayed is a
constructed example, rather than an actual person.

------
toomanybeersies
The CIA did something similar in the 50's and 60's, with a fictitious
economist called Guy Sims Fitch: [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/09/meet-guy-
sims-fitch-a-fak...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/09/meet-guy-sims-fitch-a-
fake-writer-invented-by-the-us-government/)

~~~
cheeze
And I'm sure they've done it every decade since.

------
paulgb
On the topic of media manipulation, this book has changed how I interpret
press content more than anything I've read:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying)

~~~
jseliger
The book is excellent and when I first heard about it, I figured the reviews
were enough. They were not and it should be widely read:
[https://jakeseliger.com/2014/05/07/the-death-of-the-novel-
an...](https://jakeseliger.com/2014/05/07/the-death-of-the-novel-and-ryan-
holidays-trust-me-im-lying)

------
JumpCrisscross
> _The self-described journalist who specializes in student-loan debt has been
> quoted in major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston
> Globe, and CNBC_

Curious to hear how this got past their vetting processes.

~~~
wangarific
As someone who has been quoted by major news outlets in what's likely a
similar fashion - adding color to the story rather than reporting news - there
is rarely "vetting" and the fact checking that occurs is merely confirming
that what the journalist wrote matched what I said. They don't try to find
additional sources to corroborate the story.

So the fact checking focused on the surveys conducted, the methodology, etc -
not whether Drew Cloud was a real person.

(Also, I'm a real person so it's possible they do this type of vetting and I
never experienced it because... well, I'm real)

~~~
rcarrigan87
This has been my experience as well. Most of the writers are either under so
much pressure to pump out articles they just simply don't have time to fully
vet every source OR they're a contractor and don't care to seriously vet the
source.

------
tom_mellior
This was originally posted with the original title: "Drew Cloud Is a Well-
Known Expert on Student Loans. One Problem: He’s Not Real."

And then it was changed to the current, more clickbaity one. Why? (I'm saying
"clickbaity" because the fake person's _name_ , which was relevant
information, was omitted.)

~~~
fnordsensei
There's also a comment thread curiously missing. Are there rules about what
warrants the deletion of a thread? I doubt the participants deleted their
comments individually.

~~~
tom_mellior
For whatever it's worth, my question was a genuine moderation policy question.
I wasn't trying to suggest a conspiracy or anything. I don't think there is
one.

~~~
rrcaptain
Well it doesn't help that LendEDU is a YC startup.

------
koolba
> One in five students use extra money from their student loans to buy digital
> currencies.

Is this for real or just bogus results from an unscientific survey?

~~~
astura
Totally bogus, the survey was an online poll conducted by the very website
that was reporting it, who has lied about other things as pointed out by the
article itself and these comments.

[https://www.chronicle.com/article/No-Students-Probably-
Aren-...](https://www.chronicle.com/article/No-Students-Probably-
Aren-t/243103?cid=rclink)

Also this

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/25/lendedu-ceo-says-survey-
spok...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/25/lendedu-ceo-says-survey-spokesman-
was-a-fake.html)

>Mark Kantrowitz, a well-known student loan expert, said he suspected there
might be a connection between LendEDU and Student Loan Report because both
claimed a statistical degree of precision from their surveys he said was
inconsistent with their sample sizes.... "It stood out as something both sites
do, but no one else does," Kantrowitz said. "The use of two decimal points of
precision also suggested that some of their surveys were complete
fabrications."

I'm not a statistics expert, so could someone tellmy why using two decimal
points of precision suggests survey data fabrication.

~~~
gus_massa
> _I 'm not a statistics expert, so could someone tell my why using two
> decimal points of precision suggests survey data fabrication._

If you use too many decimal in a report in the physics lab the T.A. will yell
at you and ask you to redo it.

I'm not sure that the two decimals is a sign of fabrication, but it's a sign
of sloppy work, like someone that just copy all the decimals that Excel shows
in the screen, probably because they don't know enough statistic or they don't
care, and I'd take all the conclusions with suspicion, and even take a look at
the methodology to collect the data (and try to ensure the data is not
fabricated).

To get a result with two decimal points, let's say something like 26.21%, and
be sure that the 1 has some meaning and it is not a just a blob of ink you
need a lot of subjects in your sample. A naïve analysis is to have at least
10000. If you have only 103 you get the last 1 in the division but it's
meaningless, you can't expect that if you make a bigger and better pool you
will get a result that has a 1 there. But it is worse, because the confidence
interval decrease like the square root, so you need something like 10000^2.
(There are some constants here and there, so perhaps you can get away with a
smaller sample, like 10000000 instead of 100000000, but I'm never remember the
details, but 100 is not enough.)

------
mintplant
This happened on a smaller scale—and more innocently—in the world of video
game journalism, during the golden age of Alternate Reality Games, when
"PixelVixen707" was revealed as a fictional character in a promo campaign for
a novel.

[https://kotaku.com/5859814/the-fascinating-tale-of-
pixelvixe...](https://kotaku.com/5859814/the-fascinating-tale-of-
pixelvixen-707-the-internets-most-famous-imaginary-female-video-game-critic)

~~~
lloydde
Your comment triggered me to remember “Robert X. Cringely is the pen name of
both technology journalist Mark Stephens and a string of writers for a column
in InfoWorld”
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely)

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
The most surprising thing in the whole article is that one of the people
writing as Drew Cloud could really think ‘meant’ is spelt mean’t.

~~~
fipple
> The most surprising thing in the whole article is that one of the people
> writing as Drew Cloud could really think ‘meant’ is spelt mean’t.

Spelled _

~~~
unit91
spelled

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)

~~~
dylz
I see spelt fairly often. Spelled is mostly American.

~~~
unit91
I was referring to fipple's correction with "Spelled" instead of "spelled". If
he's going to be pedantic, he's got to go all the way.

------
surds
Isn't this like using a 'Persona' for content marketing? I have come across a
few affiliate-heavy sites in very competitive niches which had a similar
persona behind them... Dig a bit deeper and all the claims to fame, like
'mentioned in Forbes', 'consultant for this', 'expert on that' just disappear.

I am not against personas per-se, but that should be evident.

~~~
astura
I recall seeing a site that was doing an A/B test with their "authors." My
friend sent me a link to a story that had the author's byline at the bottom.
Not unusual, except on my screen the byline had a picture of a man with a
short blurb about "him" and my friends screen the byline had a picture of a
woman with a totally different name and different "backstory."

I always thought that some scammy websites use pictures of models in place of
the actual author but I didn't expect a downright fabrication!

------
CM30
Does this story remind anyone else of David Manning?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_\(fictitious_writer\))

Cause he was a fake 'expert' meant to shill products too. In that case, a fake
movie critic created by Sony to sell its worst movies.

As it turned out, misleading customers that way was illegal, and hence as
mentioned on the wiki page:

> On August 3, 2005, Sony made an out-of-court settlement and agreed to refund
> $5 each to dissatisfied customers who saw Hollow Man, The Animal, The
> Patriot, A Knight's Tale, or Vertical Limit in American theatres, as a
> result of Manning's reviews.

Wonder if something similar could happen here?

------
jrq
Is this illegal, to represent opinions through pseudonymity?

Can a pseudonym legally advise someone?

My opinion is that the pseudonym is a clever way to share things that you
don't want directly associated with yourself, or things that are embarrassing,
etc.

It should be allowed, pseudonyms have been used for thousands of years in
literature.

If you're not face to face with a legal adviser and able to ask for ID, then
you DON'T HAVE a reasonable expectation of authenticity, although I don't know
if that factor matters, by the letter of the law.

This is thought provoking stuff!

~~~
wastedhours
Not sure on the illegality from pseudonymity - I'm fairly certainly you have
the right to call yourself what you want, and as long as it isn't a contract,
can live happily with a made up name (and nothing stopping multiple people
having the same pseudonym).

Potential issues are more around advertising standards, disclosure etc...

Once pitched a similar idea (without the fake persona) in a previous role - we
create a separate news source for the industry, and post the occasional
"sponsored update" about our company. I scrapped pursuing it as the CEO didn't
want the disclosure statement that it was connected to us prominently on every
page. No way I was going to do it under the table, for exactly these kind of
reasons.

------
vignesh_m
I dont really understand how those stats would help the company. Can anyone
enlighten me? I only have a cursory understanding of how student loans work -
students buy loans to pay college fees and stuff right.

------
acobster
> Matherson said Cloud "was created as a way to connect with our readers...and
> give us the technical ability to post content to the Wordpress website."

Um. What?

------
a-dub
Shady junk mail for sketchy financial services, reimagined.

------
lolc
Let's call it what it is: a fabrication. The people who created Drew Cloud are
liars. And they lie for money.

In my view this should mark the end of their careers. They should be welcomed
to see the error of their ways and try again with better ethics. Unfortunately
this is not how it will go. There is great demand for professional liars, and
these authors will not have to stop and think over.

If you're going to lie, make sure your motives are above personal gain.

Well, have I just binned the entire industry of ghostwriters as liars over
this minor outrage? Or is it different if the person I'm writing for actually
exists? I'll have to mull this over.

~~~
soperj
The most famous write in person is also a fabrication: Ann Landers.

~~~
mikeyouse
A pen name isn't remotely the same as a fabrication like "Mr. Cloud".

~~~
koala_man
It was a pen name backed by multiple writers. Why is it different?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Was there a commercial conflict of interest between the writing and the
writers?

~~~
mikeyouse
And it was always understood to be a pen name. Nobody was under the illusion
that there was someone named "Ann Landers" dispensing advice, they even held a
contest for the replacement when one of the earlier writers passed away.

~~~
kolpa
How can you say that "nobody was under the illusion"? Surely millions of
people were -- the newspapers didn't disclose that the name was a pseudonym,
and plenty of other advice columnists aren't pseudonyms.

~~~
lolc
Interesting. I guess the difference is she never claimed to be a real person.
Though I don't know that.

I have a hard time believing that if the question was posed "are you real?"
the answer would have been "I'm traveling between conferences."

~~~
evincarofautumn
I don’t usually claim to be a real person either, but it’s generally assumed
that I am.

------
onetimemanytime
Damn, Drew Cloud for student loans and James Blockchain for investing were my
2 go-to people. Now what?

~~~
sterlind
Deepak Lerning?

~~~
adrianratnapala
The thing is that in some village in India there is probably some real dude
with that very name, and he probably has no idea why some nerds think it is
funny.

~~~
sterlind
One of my coworkers had the first name of Engineer! An excellent engineer, in
both senses.

------
someguydave
Bitcoin is definitely a scam and us-government-backed finance is awesome in
every way.

------
txsh
This is only slightly more nefarious than when these newspapers inventa
source.

~~~
shaki-dora
That’s conspiracy bullshit.

Journalists allow unnamed sources to get the truth out. In doing so, they
substitute their own reputation for that of the source.

You’d never heard about Watergate or Abu Grhaib without anonymous sources.

------
whatshisface
For anyone who hasn't already read it, this essay by our own Paul Graham
describes this process:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
poof131
I don’t think that’s the same at all. The submarine article is about helping
journalists with stories. This article is about lying to journalists and
everyone else by creating a fictitious person, all for their company’s
financial benefit. And ironically they tout their intent to “provide
transparency”. Too bad they didn’t make him a combat vet, then they could have
been prosecuted.[1] Makes me think of a quote I once heard, “Integrity is what
we tell other people to have.”

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Valor_Act_of_2013](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Valor_Act_of_2013)

~~~
whatshisface
> _The submarine article is about helping journalists with stories_ > _I don’t
> think that’s the same at all._

The parallel I see is that in both cases, you're introducing things into the
news cycle for your own benefit. In the Submarine article, PG even talks about
how shaky statistics were made more credible by insertion into publications
(like a PR-driven version of this xkcd[0]).

The difference between submarine tactics and what happened here was that the
data was outright false instead of merely cherry-picked or optimistic.
However, a journalist who is doing their job will catch _both_ : they will not
allow information to be presented as having a higher confidence than it
actually does, whether that means promoting a number from "made up" to
"reported somewhere," or promoting a number from "reported somewhere," to
"credibly sourced."

So, the similarity that I see in both cases is the willingness of journalists
to serve private interests by reporting error bars as less wide as they
actually are; so long as they do not mis-report the mean values being focused
on.

The same? No. Similar? Yes, they both involve exploiting the same bug in the
system.

[0] [https://xkcd.com/978/](https://xkcd.com/978/)

~~~
snowwrestler
> The parallel I see is that in both cases, you're introducing things into the
> news cycle for your own benefit.

That's just PR.

I'm tired of PG's submarine essay. Although he's got a cute hook with the
concept of "the submarine," what he describes in the article is just bog
standard PR. But somehow HN folks (most of whom have no direct experience with
PR themselves) have come to believe, based on PG's essay, that anything
involving placing a story with a reporter is some special thing called a
submarine.

Anyway, yes, this fake person is an example of PR, but the reason it's worth
writing about is that it's a great example of truly shitty PR. Reporters live
to find out The Truth, and they hate to get lied to or fooled. Anyone who put
Drew Cloud in their stories is going to be pissed off at LendEDU for a long
time. Pissing off reporters and editors is generally considered to be a bad PR
strategy.

------
smallgovt
There seem to be two things going on here: \- writing behind a pseudonym \-
spreading misinformation

As others have pointed out, the practice of writing behind a pseudonym, in of
itself, doesn't seem all that nefarious. Think: ghostwriters or reddit making
up a bunch of fake accounts to simulate website activity.

The practice of spreading misinformation is bad, but none of the
misinformation they spread seems practically damaging.

Not sure why, but this seems to be getting a lot more attention than it
deserves. Give them a break?

~~~
forapurpose
They didn't write under a pseudonym, but perpetrated fraud on other other
organizations and on the public by creating a false identity and pretending it
was real. Those are completely different acts.

smallgovt is a psuedonym; you're not claiming it's a real name of a real
person, and making up a fake backstory, and getting quoted in the Washington
Post.

------
_bxg1
The real story here is that respected sources like The Washington Post didn't
investigate their sources and spot the fake news before publishing it.
Fabrications are a dime a million on the internet, but real journalists are
supposed to do enough homework to cut through the crap.

