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You Won't Know It When You See It: The Challenges of Fabricated Evidence in the Digital Age

By John G. Browning and Jonathan Bailie
April 01, 2022

It was a Perry Mason moment for the Digital Age, and it came on one of the biggest of stages — in the midst of a heated, $1.4 billion lawsuit between two oil giants squaring off in a Fort Worth, TX courtroom in 2015. Moncrief Oil International had sued Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom over an unsuccessful contract to purchase part of a Russian gas field in the late 1990s. Moncrief alleged that it had shared inside information with Gazprom in 2004 about a planned natural gas plant in Texas, and that Gazprom used that information to cut a better deal with Occidental Petroleum, the plant's manufacturer. Gazprom denied receiving any trade secrets, only to have Moncrief and its lawyers confront them with a 2004 PowerPoint slide deck. A single slide from that presentation, containing a chart from an analysis of natural gas value claim costs prepared by a University of Texas geologist, was the supposed "smoking gun."

But when Gazprom's legal team did an Internet search that revealed that the information in the "2004" slide was actually prepared in 2012, the "smoking gun" was exposed as a fabrication. Gazprom moved for sanctions, and Moncrief's lawyers — acknowledging that an "employee made a tragic mistake that created a flawed record" — voluntarily dismissed their billion dollar lawsuit with prejudice. All of this was the result of someone putting the title of the chart in question into Google, and seeing the actual author from 2012 appear atop the search results.

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