Is this data science professor a victim or a villain?

Apparently, some secretive entity is trying to maximally embarrass Forbes magazine as much as possible. One by one, they are exposing people on Forbes' 30 under 30 or 40 under 40 list of young entrepreneurs as fraudsters. Elizabeth Holmes has already been found guilty of fraud in her medical tech startup. Sam Bankman-Fried is being sued for running a type of Ponzi scheme in his crypto startup. And now, Charlie Javice is being sued by JPMorgan for faking customer lists in her college financial aid app startup (named Frank).

According to the Wall Street Journal (link with paywall), an unnamed data science professor played a role in this fraud, and that definitely caught my attention.

The unnamed professor, who was paid $18,000, used computer-generated information to show Frank’s purported user base, including details like names, birthdays and schools they attended, the suit alleged...“Our plan was to sample first name and last name independently and then ensure none of the sampled names are real,” the suit alleges the professor wrote to Ms. Javice.

This sounds very bad. Apparently, JPMorgan alleged that about 90% of the data were faked.

However, I don't think we can read from this excerpt whether the professor has also been duped, or the professor was part of the con. It could be the case that Javice contracted the professor to generate simulated data, supposedly for some legitimate purpose.

The other reason this case strikes a chord with me is that many of the emerging data science/AI technologies can easily be exploited to deceive and hurt people, and there does not appear to be much serious discussion of this problem.