OmniPapers.com and the fake "Emily Johnson" - the anatomy of the Soviet-style propaganda

In this intensive post I'd like to research the anatomy of a fraud - the Soviet style. You will see how the real Ukrainian / Russian propaganda works today and how effective it can be. The deceptive steps can work not only in the academic niche, but also in business and politics on the highest level. You can conclude it could be dangerous when even academic institutions, reporters, and PhDs that believe this fake profile is real can be tricked this way.

OmniPapers.com was created on 2013-10-29. For the next several months, the domain has been redirected to their own writing service page - Writing-Help.com from Ukraine. Writing-Help and their phone number: 1-866-751-7057 is still related to other sites, including CustomWritings.com, bestessays.com, EssayShark.com, rushessay.com, CheapEssayOnline.com, EssayTigers.com, Bid4papers.com, freshessays.com, Edusson.com, AdvancedWriters.com, EduBirdie.com or ultius.com.DND. The operators of these sites among Russian essay affiliates have been trying to hack this site via negative SEO attacks for several years now.

Screen1 - Jan 2, 2014:



By Dec 2014, they removed the redirection and created a stand-alone website:

Screen 2 - Dec 3, 2014:



OmniPapers added fake rankings and reviews of the sites they operate. These were just a few of their sites since they own hundreds of them. Later on they added the "reviews" section where they added more fabricated reviews of their other online properties. The "ranked essay writing services" that they present on OmniPapers.com are their seed sites important when linking their other services for search engine gains. The purpose of OmniPapers was to present "reviews of essay writing services." In order to give authority to the site, they came up with an idea which was popular back then when Google announced that website authority is important for good search engine rankings.

According to Google's rules, to be an authority, the "author" should become popular among the business niche they work with. That's why from then on, they have been trying to continue with this idea by building up this fraudulent "authority" profile.

They have chosen this name: "Emily Johnson" as their authority name. They came up with a fake story of "Emily Johnson" who was an "author", "content blogger", and "marketing strategist." The last name choice was not accidental. Fraudsters would NEVER choose a unique surname. That would save investigators or whoever checks their profile online a lot of time if the surname was unique. Instead they ALWAYS pick a very common surname. "Johnson" was a perfect match because there are dozens of people with this surname who work online. The goal was to create confusion and the too-much-information effect that discourages people from digging deeper into researching the profile.

Next, they had to add some real life components to the profile. They wanted to go big so they had to assume that the profile and credentials would be eventually checked by someone. The most logical and safest personality of a "blogger" was a student. In result they started looking for some REAL person / student with the name "Emily Johnson". They went to Google to start digging.

A good result was Emily Johnson, back then the REAL student of the University of North Carolina. Perhaps they targeted the UNC because they knew someone (a freelance writer working for them?) who had a student @edu email account set up at that school. An .edu email account can be helpful for creating profiles on other academic websites. Either way, the name was actually perfect because in 2014 when OmniPapers was created, the real Emily Johnson graduated from the UNC. Below is her real Linkedin profile information (in the meantime she must have gotten married and added the second name to the Johnson's surname). Notice that there is absolutely no mention about her having anything to do with OmniPapers, writing, or content management in her profile.

Screen-3. REAL Emily Johnson - from linkedin.com/in/emily-johnson-erday-63878898/



Check out these important facts:

1. The REAL Emily Johnson studied at the University of North Carolina between 2009-2014.
2. The REAL Emily Johnson moved to New York City in 2016.

Now let's examine the FAKE "Emily Johnson" aka OmniPapers profiles.

From Linkedin:

Screen - 4: FAKE "Emily Johnson" - from linkedin.com/in/emilyjohnson322/



Screen - 5: FAKE "Emily Johnson" - from unco.academia.edu/EmilyJohnson



Notice these facts:

1. The FAKE "Emily Johnson" has set up an account on academia.edu as a student of the UNCO (University of North Carolina). The same university as the REAL Emily Johnson.

2. On Linkedin, the FAKE "Emily Johnson" profile says that she currently lives in New York City. The REAL Emily Johnson has also moved to New York city.

Coincidence and confusion by design. OmniPapers appears to have been watching the moves of the real Emily to keep up and adjust their profile information.

IF they were the same persons they would NOT set up separate profiles, would they.

That's not all. The above was just "text and logic" confusion build up. There is also the "visual design" confusion aspect.

Let's examine the profile pictures now.

Screen 6 - The FAKE "Emily Johnson" from OmniPapers vs the REAL Emily Johnson:



This is where the fraud takes into the next gear. They wanted to make sure that not only education and credentials matched the real thing but also that the profile picture corresponded to the real Emily Johnson. Since the real Emily is a theater actress, there were some good pictures of her available at the time OmniPapers created the fake profile. They wanted to match her looks so that whoever checks their profile on social media thinks that the profile picture could belong to the real / former student of the UNC.

We know that some Ukrainian and Russian "academic paper services" have evolved from mail-order brides services that featured fake profiles of women. That's why it should not be surprising that they can fake pictures and had access to many of them. They could take the real Emily's photo and post it as their profile but that would be way too risky especially that the real Emily Johnson had her own profiles on the same social media sites. It could also potentially destroy their efforts when the real Emily or someone who knows her reports the profile and it gets deleted. As the result they wanted to have the OmniPapers "Emily Johnson" profile to be similarly confusing to the real Emily's picture, meaning that at first look someone may think that the pictures present the same person.

As the result they came up with this picture as above. I present them side by side so that you can come to your own conclusion that these are different persons. Notice the different eyes color, different eye brows, different nose, different lips. To me it is not a natural picture - I dare to say that they told the OmniPapers girl to try to mimic the real Emily --- notice the unnatural smile as an effort to make the lips shape look the same. Still they surely aren't the same. What do you think?

Since 2014, the bogus "Emily Johnson" has continued to live as a real person. OmniPapers.com is their hornets nest to give authority and links to their essay mill sites. They even expanded and link to other shady SEO sites to boost each other authority in search engines. The fake "Emily Johnson's" job is to build more and more authority, get as many links to OmniPapers as possible because it means more authority to their essay service websites. And through this fake profile they continue getting more links from various institutions that think that "Emily Johnson" from OmniPapers is a real person, not an Ukrainian essay mill hack. Just check for yourself how deep this goes and how many different persons and organizations link to the fake profile. They think it's a legitimate person: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22emily+johnson%22+omnipapers

So this is it folks. You can see how far the deception goes. Soviet-style propaganda. Hacking and personal identity theft of private citizens, deception of media organizations and academic institutions in day light. This is my reasoning and my research. Tell me if you find some flaws or inconsistency. You can check and judge for yourself and if something is not right post it here. If I made a mistake I'll own up to it. But I believe my eyes, logic and reason, so you should. This research could be important not only from academic research perspective. Consider the "fake news" perspective too. When you realize that one foreign organization can build prominent online profiles in the US academia and media ecosystem on fabricated data and present it as the real thing. Then others also believe it's the real thing and authority builds on totally fake foundations.

It's going be some shock to the real EJ the first time she does a Google search on herself and finds this thread.

Added: screenshots of posts from the WritersDigest forum (site:writersdigest.com emilyjohnson33333 in Google). Clear ESL language. But the same profile picture and links to Twitter and Facebook profiles as everywhere else. I believe these Writers Digest posts were written by the original OmniPapers aka "fake Emily Johnson writer". Later on | today the OmniPapers profile | website is commercially used by all those affiliated Ukrainian and Russian essay mill services for their own marketing campaigns aka "writing contests" aka "writing scholarships" aka infographics aka search engine | link-bait spam. It's impossible that in 2015 the same "person" was using very broken ESL language and today the promotional posts written by the same "person" read completely different.

I expect to see a company representative from OmniPapers.com to show up here anytime now to dispel everything that your investigation just revealed. Of course they will never admit to the deceitful practice that you discovered. They may even claim that the women just happen to share similar information. The basis being that the name is so common, there could really have been two of them enrolled at the same university in similar / different majors. Of course nobody will fall for that line of reasoning.

We all know that they will play the denial game because their business depends upon it. However, you have made sure that they won't be able to create a solid defense for any of their claims. Good job. Now, if only they would just remove the fake site and profile rather than keeping it up there, waiting for people to fall into their trap. If the real EJ ever comes across this, she should definitely consider suing them for identity theft.

Well, no company rep showed up to dispel the intensive investigation presentation. So I guess they decided it would be more advantageous to them to simply let this thread die a natural death. Perhaps they adhere to the "The best defense is no defense" way of thinking. Sadly, I came along to revive this thread, which means, the investigation results dissemination continues. More students will be made conscious of the way they can be duped by the Russian writing companies and, they will be thankful that the thread came to life again, before they could make a mistake by hiring this company and others they may have been considering. After all.they would not have known actual location of the company if it had not been published for them to find.

Well, they still the website under the same rules as before so it must be working for them. The fake reviews help the students choose among their company owned websites, allowing the con to run longer than it normally would have. They keep their hands clean and pretend to offer a useful service to the students. In a way, they came up with this to get around ES and the way that we review sites and warn students about the fraud companies.