In April 2025, David Victorson, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, was polishing several manuscripts for submission when a colleague sent him a link to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Op4G, a market research company he first worked with more than a decade earlier, was being indicted for selling bogus data between 2014 and 2023. In fact, Victorson had just used them to run an online survey related to meditation as part of a U.S. National Institutes of Health project to create a standardized mindfulness metric. He didn’t yet know whether his own data were compromised, but he knew there was no way he’d be submitting his manuscripts with those data.
In the aftermath of the revelations about the fraud, researchers at a half dozen institutions inside the United States have been scrambling to review and correct or update their published studies and unpublished manuscripts. In June, 2026, The Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology retracted a 2023 study on the role of social media in supporting young adults with cancer, after the authors notified it of their concerns. Other studies have not been updated swiftly.