The Lies We Buy

I tested out the company’s services myself by asking if someone could get me out of work for a few days. Claiming to be my mother, a Paladin employee called my boss on a Wednesday and said she had planned a surprise visit to New York and that I would be out of the office for the rest of the week. While the call raised some suspicions, especially given how rude and abrupt my “mother” was, my boss ultimately bought it.

I also spoke with a woman who said she hired Paladin to impersonate a former boss when she was applying for a restaurant job (because she and her real boss had a falling out), and that she wouldn’t have gotten the job without it.

CNN reports that a company called Paladin Deception Services will lie to whomever you’d like for $54 a month. They’ll do things like create a fake employer for potential employers to call, or make up alibis for workers who want to play hooky or cheat on their partners. But the people using the service are mostly job seekers who want to make up an employment history or get a fake reference.

Oh, and by the way, the woman the reporter talked to who used the service to hire someone to impersonate her former boss? That was a lie too: “I ended up tracing her phone number back to Green, who admitted he had ‘pulled a prank’ on me by creating a fake customer.”

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