Letter to the Editor: A possible threat to data integrity for online qualitative autism research.
Check IDs in online autism studies—scammers are already posing as participants.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Pellicano et al. (2024) wrote a short warning letter. They noticed fake people in three online studies about autism.
Each study used surveys and video calls. The team caught scammers who pretended to be autistic adults or parents.
What they found
Some replies came from the same device. Other "participants" gave stock photos instead of real faces.
The authors say fraud is a new threat to online autism research. They urge teams to check who is really on the other side of the screen.
How this fits with other research
de Jonge et al. (2025) picked up the warning and tested fixes. Their new paper shows that quick ID checks plus short follow-up calls block most scammers without hurting autistic people who need extra time.
Broder-Fingert et al. (2019) also wrote a letter about participant problems, but they focused on age and IQ skew in clinic studies. The 2024 letter adds online fraud as a fresh worry, not a contradiction.
Neale et al. (2022) showed that COVID-19 pushed autism work online. The fraud spike is part of that shift, so the two papers fit side-by-side.
Why it matters
If you run social-validity surveys or parent interviews on Zoom, copy the 2025 fixes: ask for a photo ID, pose one open question before the main task, and do a five-minute video hello. These steps take ten extra minutes and keep your data clean.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Doing research online, via Zoom, Teams, or live chat, is becoming more and more common. It can help researchers to reach more people, including from different parts of the world. It can also make the research more accessible for participants, especially those with different communication preferences. However, online research can have its downsides too. We have recently been involved in three studies in which we had in-depth discussions with autistic people and/or parents of autistic children about various topics. It turns out, though, that some of these participants were not genuine. Instead, we believe they were "scammer participants": people posing as autistic people or parents of autistic children, possibly to gain money from doing the research. This is a real problem because we need research data that we can trust. In this letter, we encourage autism researchers to be wary of scammer participants in their own research.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2024 · doi:10.1177/13623613231174543