In recent years, research, especially surveys and qualitative studies, has moved online in large numbers. That shift brought clear advantages: lower thresholds, more inclusion, and lower costs. And for studies involving young people, a Zoom or Teams conversation is often far less intimidating than a schoolroom full of unfamiliar adults. But quietly, a new and deeply uncomfortable threat has emerged alongside those benefits: participants who are not participants at all.
A recent commentary in the Journal of Adolescent Health describes how “imposter participants” are not only increasing but becoming industrial in scale. Some studies have received up to 80 per cent fraudulent applications. In their own youth study, Pitt, Rubin and Smith considered 200 of 250 applications suspicious. Eight out of ten. At that point, you no longer have a sampling issue; you have a fundamental validity problem. And it affects exactly the groups that online research was supposed to reach more effectively.
The classic list of red flags turns out to be nearly useless for adolescents: camera off, vague answers, poor audio, preference for vouchers. Not because fraudsters are so clever, but because real teenagers show the same patterns. Young people who live in crowded or noisy homes, or in rural areas with unreliable Wi-Fi, or who do not have a bank card, suddenly start to look like fraudsters. The proposed solutions risk filtering out the very voices researchers want to include.
The commentary also shows how large the ethical tension becomes. If you run a group session with “teenagers” and discover afterwards that one participant was an unknown adult, you have a serious safeguarding problem. But strict ID checks can just as easily destroy already fragile trust. Asking a 13-year-old for a passport before they can join a discussion is not very realistic, especially in countries like the United States.
One fascinating element is that the researchers involved young people as co-researchers to help detect fraud. That produced insights adults might completely miss: language that is a little too formal, sentences that sound AI-generated, or not knowing which school year matches which age. The young co-researchers also suggested alternative incentives, such as vouchers redeemable only at local shops, which discourage overseas fraud.
Some solutions are both surprisingly simple and surprisingly complex. One is transparency. The researchers explained to participants why they sometimes needed identification. Honesty proved less damaging than suspicion. But it remains a balancing act. If you are too strict, you exclude genuine young participants. If you become too lenient, your data collapses.
What stays with you after reading the commentary is not the technology but the irony. We moved online to make research more inclusive and more accessible, yet we are creating new barriers. We want to take young people seriously as research partners, but we also need to protect them from people who pretend to be them. That is not a minor issue. And it becomes even bigger if we act as if it is.