Some of your commenters are shocked that anybody would be fooled. I'm not. We fool ourselves all the time by seeing what we want to see, or what we already believe to be true. Scammers, con artists, salesmen, politicians, etc. rely on that glitch in how we process information (confirmation bias) all the time.

It's also true that many people don't know how to evaluate online information, or to recognize what kinds of assertions they should automatically be skeptical about.

Important article. I didn't realize how big this new industry had become.