That's essentially what has been happening for years with North Korean defectors being motivated by cash payments for interviews and information and why their testimonies have proven to be so notoriously unreliable. The defectors became well aware of what the interviewers wanted to hear. This practice drove the demand for “saleable stories”: the more exclusive, shocking or emotional, the higher the fee. Consequently, we get to frequently hear fantastical stories of human atrocities from North Korean defectors who claim to be eyewitnesses like Lee Soon-ok who offered testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2004, vividly describing torture and the killing of Christians in hot liquid iron in North Korean political prisons. This was then later debunked by defector associations which had first hand knowledge that Lee had never even been a political prisoner.
That's essentially what has been happening for years with North Korean defectors being motivated by cash payments for interviews and information and why their testimonies have proven to be so notoriously unreliable. The defectors became well aware of what the interviewers wanted to hear. This practice drove the demand for “saleable stories”: the more exclusive, shocking or emotional, the higher the fee. Consequently, we get to frequently hear fantastical stories of human atrocities from North Korean defectors who claim to be eyewitnesses like Lee Soon-ok who offered testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2004, vividly describing torture and the killing of Christians in hot liquid iron in North Korean political prisons. This was then later debunked by defector associations which had first hand knowledge that Lee had never even been a political prisoner.