At least it was caught in time, so it it looks like it was more a failed attempt at fraud with wasted cash. Better than last year’s debacle, which…I dunno…progress? Sorta?
Somebody threw away a lot of money. But why? The “Hugo winner” label doesn’t significantly boost sales.
My guess would be someone(s) associated with the scandal last year who just wanted to taint the process.
And if there’s no evidence the author was involved, then who was it throwing all the money?
It may have been a hater of the presumed winner
Could be like the Chuck Tingle thing - someone was trying to manipulate the vote to nominate someone they saw as invalidating the awards, and not because the person they nominated agreed with their politics.
But we are talking about $22,000 paid for the fake memberships. It has to be someone pretty serious to pay that much.
But that’s moot, the answer is that it was China trying to buy a Hugo like they bought the Worldcon. See the comments here:
But the memberships were paid, and I remember people buying memberships for the cat back in the day- and no one blinked an eye if the check cleared.
From the comments? Those are not back by anything solid, and I scroll down a bit- there are lots and lots of comments. Mind you, that is the most likely, sure.
Buying memberships for non-human entities has been accepted for years - I know someone who bought a membership for his pet rock, under the name of R.Ock. However, these were non-voting memberships.The issue here was that someone voted using those memberships, which is non permitted.
Ahh, thank you for clearing that up.
Yawn
This has happened before. In 1989, two authors bought a bunch of memberships to get their joint novel onto the ballot. It was discovered and they withdrew the book. They did keep them on the ballot for the Campbell Award for best new writer , but they didn’t win and never published anoth novel.
Right. It’s “yawn” because a shitty corrupt thing happened one time before. Wtf?
Also, completely glossing over the difference between self-promotion and a seemingly state-driven effort.
Because this isn’t any different. Someone tried to game the system, and was caught. Same for the Sad Puppies. End of story.
That’s my impression, though I don’t know much about it. Was there really anything “scandalous” or “controversial” about the way this was handled (i.e. the 2024 Hugos, as opposed to 2023 which was indeed messed up)?
AFAIK, no scandals on how it was handled. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The Glasgow committee (another reminder it’s entirely different people this time than Chengdu) have been very aware of the situation they were unfortunately placed in, so they have been as transparent and open about the situation as it is possible (and legal) to be. No doubt next year’s crew in Seattle (yet again different folks) will do the same.
They themselves announced the shenanigans rather than having it exposed by anybody else. The only thing they left totally secret was the identify of the work that was getting the extra votes, noting only that it was not the winner. They did not believe the target author was involved and exposing them would not be a good thing.
From the File770 article:
A large number of votes in 2024 were cast by accounts which fail to meet the criteria of being “natural persons”, with obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics. These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.
Man, I can’t think of a more obvious, less sensible, or as oblivious to reality procedure to generate false ballots if I tried. Let’s hope China is indeed behind this. China is at least a competitor and may be an enemy. We should want our enemies to be this hopelessly inept.
Here’s the block of names with consecutive translated numbers:
susan jiang
su’si jiang
suwu jiang
suliu jiang
suqi jiang
Starting at member #14907 here.
And right below that, John Ya Ya, John Parrot, John Bigboote, John Nolan, John O’Connor, and John Small Berries.
I think you have switched from having the list arranged by ticket number to having it arranged by name.