The international conman and pathological Liar-in-Thief Matthew Stephenson didn’t like Smut Clyde‘s earlier article about him, and the retractions it caused him, so he tried (and failed) to get it removed by making fraudulent DMCA Take-Down claims.

To help that fake neurosurgeon/quantum physicist/software engineer/Olympic sharp-shooter Stephenson understand what a pillock he is – here is a follow-up, with exclusive information which Smut Clyde obtained from people Stephenson tricked, harassed and stole from.

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Who are you? (he wore gloves of grey suede)

A quantum theoretician, a neurosurgeon and a software engineer walk into a bar together…

Recall Matthew Stephenson (MJS for short), who wants to be a scientist while skipping the boring work of actual sciencing. He has published several papers and preprints (not all of them retracted yet), and was persuasive enough to blag his way into the pool of Cureus peer reviewers, to gain early access to stealable manuscripts.¹

Since that first blogpost, MJS has tried hard to goad me into writing the inevitable disappointing sequel. The first plea for attention took the form of poison-pen emails sent to the organisers of a color-perception conference that I attended years earlier, accusing them of gross dereliction when they invited a speaker who was really notorious science sleuth “Smut Clyde”. These emails were signed “D B Smithie”, which I choose to interpret as a homage to the secular saint of anonymity, Alan Smithee.

Meanwhile For Better Science received not one, not three, but two DMCA take-down demands asserting MJS’ sincere “good-faith belief” that tabling the evidence of his plagiarism was a violation of his copyright on the material he stole: the text and images became his when he licked them.² This sort of malicious consequence-free abuse is exactly what the DMCA was designed to facilitate, but I digress. Both times WordPress invited MJS to fuck himself with a rusty farm implement, preferably a combine harvester.

So I am happy to oblige, with a post that is partly a Public Service Announcement and partly the use of MJS as an example of a recurring theme in Bad Science. The first post already brought responses from helpful readers that became part of the text below. Must credit [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED].

Fortunately For Better Science is not the only source of PSAs… other people have interacted with MJS and feel obliged to warn anyone else in the same position to ensure that their possessions are fastened down firmly: intellectual property as well as physical valuables.

It is convenient, or at least satisfying, to begin near the end of the story, in July 2023. Bruno Rucy Carneiro Alves De Lima or BRC for short – a Brazilian software engineer, currently studying in Estonia at the University of Tartu – was across the Gulf of Finland on a day-trip to Helsinki, and struck up a conversation with MJS in the Helsinki Central Library after overhearing an American voice. BRC subsequently became the World’s Leading Expert in MJS Studies, and probably deserves co-authorship on this post.

MJS did not immediately inspire confidence, with an account of himself that involved the Gifted Student High School stream, followed by neurosurgery internships at prestigious medical colleges from which he dropped out to pursue his true vocations in quantum physics and software. Preprints were brandished, to demonstrate MJS’ ventures into esoteric physics. Names were dropped – in particular the name of a Fredrik Kjolstad, a Stanford University computer science lecturer, supposedly the supervisor of MJS’ Ph.D in 2020 – though not accompanied by any sense of subject mastery in the field of sparse-algebra optimization. The encounter also left BRC wondering who was the “Sheep” who featured as the ID on MJS’ phone screen. Still, you are never worse-off for hearing an outsider’s perspective, and in BRC’s telling he invited MJS to comment on and contribute to his work-in-progress (“A Differential Datalog Interpreter”). This circulating manuscript had accrued some attention in the field for its innovative approach and its unfinished condition.

The outcome of the encounter was that MJS copied the work-in-progress during the short window of time in which he had access to the GitHub repo. He replaced the names of BRC and coauthors with his own (though he forgot to file off the serial number in the form of Footnote 25 which provides the original authorship), and uploaded it – unchanged and incomplete – to arXiv. Then to a Special Issue of the MDPI journal Software, with back-up copies at a range of other preprint servers.

Arxiv were eventually persuaded to take down rival versions of “A Differential Datalog Interpreter” although the process involved advice from Tartu University lawyers, support from Stanford University, a DMCA take-down strike from BRC, a copy-pasted DMCA counterstrike from MJS, and a great deal of time. Over at MDPI the Software editors have been informed by many people that the paper is unfinished (and plagiarised, and a breach of copyright). The original Special Issue guest editors have moved on and ignored the issue, while the managing editor reads emails but no longer replies to them.

If people took MDPI journals seriously, the pre-published plagiarism would make it hard for BRC et al. to publish their finished project. I am advised that they did manage though at the cost of salami-slicing the project into separate segments.

However! Concern was Expressed on 6 May 2024:

“With this notice, the Software Editorial Office states their awareness of the concerns regarding the appropriateness of the authorship and origins of the study of the published manuscript [1]. The author and the institution of this publication have been contacted for further clarification on this matter. The Editorial Office is coordinating an investigation in accordance with MDPI procedures and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. An update will be available once the investigation is complete.”.

It is unclear whether the “institution” in question is Stanford where MJS pretended to be faculty, or the home of a student email account, University of Washington.

All this is why BRC is now World’s Leading Expert on MJS. The imbroglio inspired curiosity, and research, and there are few secrets from a computer-security researcher.

It used to be that wondering about MJT would lead one to a webpage in which ‘Sheep’ reported her experiences with Matthew – a pattern of stalking and gaslighting and identity theft. That page, intended to caution the readers was PSA #1. It is gone now… taken down, one suspects, by a barrage of DMCA demands. A copy lingered for a while in the Internet Archive, but the Wayback Machine has avenues by which copyright claimants can have mirrored material removed, and this too is open to malicious abuse.

Ayo! Apparently my roommate Matt Stephenson during GDC was a career criminal and might message folk impersonating me or as a friend of mine. Please be care all! https://t.co/sIaER62n9G

— Manny Mallea (@MannyMallea) March 28, 2022

NEVER MIND! a second-hand version exists, thanks to Rebecca Brightly (whom I have not managed to thank, despite overcoming my aversion to social media for long enough to sign up for an Instagram account). This is PSA #2.

Which is to say, we are no longer near the end of the story; welcome to a flashback to the beginning of the story. Sheep’s account was written in 2018; Rebecca’s summary is dated February 2019. The context of these reports is the Parkour community of urban-assault-course enthusiasts, for whom every building-site or high-rise parking building is an athletic invitation. It seems to be a community of cooperation, with an ethos of openness, inclusivity, welcoming newcomers and sharing skills to help everyone reach their full potential. The specific location is Seattle. But Parkour is also an international community. It is also a vulnerable environment for petty fraud, and stuff went missing.

So evidently an extensive back-story was already in place by 2019.

Perhaps the encounters with cool young techies in the Seattle parkour scene were the inspiration for MJS’ conviction that he deserved to be just as well-educated, or more so. His lab-coat dress-up games began about then – first with neurosurgery and the successful infiltration of medical facilities. Hence the @petrousapex Instagram account, and the nym ‘Sphenopetroclival’ he used to create a short-lived vanity entry at Wikipedia. Also hence the retracted plagiarism, and a not-yet-retracted self-promotional obituary.

Other expressions of the ‘Scientist’ self-concept followed. The Quantum Physicist persona involved infiltrating the ‘Holographic Duality’ research group. MJS stole various works-in-progress and dissertations from Sašo Grozdanov and his students, sequestering them in preprint servers (or as a Print-on-Demand Amazon Book in the case of Kaplis’ PhD work).

A Stanford period followed, where MJS infiltrated classes to develop his Computer Science persona… no papers were stolen but the identity of Dr Fredrik Kjolstad became part of his elaborate fantasy life.

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The Finland encounter with BRC is not quite the latest chapter in the story. MJS was most recently sighted in Athens, where his stellar academic scores from Stanford and MIT had earned him a free place in a software-skills boot-camp run by a Greek branch of the Zone01 franchise (the Zone01 business model is that students undertake to repay tuition when they graduate and find employment).

By then MJS’ claims to an academic affiliation had switched to the University of Alabama, Huntsville – he certainly acquired the burner student email account there – but that educational opportunity must have fallen into abeyance.

He soon aroused concern among Zone01 faculty and students by lacking (a) interest in personal grooming and hygiene, and (b) the mad coding skills he had promised. They tried in vain to convince him that copy-pasting code from ChatGPT responses is not an adequate substitute for learning the for-loop syntax in Golang. His insistence on using ‘Sheep’ as his cellphone name also elevated eyebrows.

When other students found their entire projects disappearing, suspicion turned to MJS, who had been boasting in Discord channels that a sufficiently-skilled hacker could delete GitHub repositories even without access permissions. Also he appeared to be sleeping in the Zone01 building in the absence of accommodation – accounting for an unkempt appearance, while providing access to other students’ accounts if they forgot to log off completely. Management rescinded the policy of keeping the offices open around the clock. The end of MJS’ tuition there came when he was caught climbing scaffolding next door to the building, at midnight, as if searching for a way in… one of my informants coined the name “Lames Bond” and I am so stealing that. Though he is still firing off poison-pen letters and threatening the Zone01 management with legal threats, both full of accusations that the real reason for his expulsion was racism against his dark complexion (and / or his Finnish forebears). It was not a comfortable situation for the rest of the class, especially female students, who eagerly anticipated his departure from Athens. MJS is believed to be headed back to Finland next, where one trusts his contact / source of accommodation has read the PSAs.

“Also the female student that was the first victim told me that he would be a little inappropriate with her, ask her odd questions like where she lived and if she lived alone and would seemingly follow her around, often being near the restrooms every time she’d use them. She got fed up with him and started to ignore him, and Matthew ended up saying some mean things to her later on. He would also dm her frequently on discord, which she never responded to.”

All this makes for entertaining reading (although the movie adaptation will be criticised for exaggerating the main character far beyond the bounds of disbelief suspension). But like the Parkour community, Science has its own ethos of openness and inclusivity and mutual trust, and this is what makes MJS relevant to my interests (I would hate for people to think that BRC and myself and others keep track of his activities and locations because we are stalking him). The difference with parkour is that Science is already rife with narcissists, stalkers, gaslighters and manipulative conmen exploiting the vulnerabilities opened up by that expectation of trust.

Perhaps this encouraged MJS’ belief that this Scientist cosplay could become true by gaining general acceptance. This is the Age of the Conman, after all, where self-confident charlatans can blag their way into the leadership of the UK and the US, and (more to the point) into well-remunerated Principal Investigator roles. There was a time when incorrigible fantasists were a source of entertainment, Baron-Münchausen-style, harmlessly constructing their castles in the air, and we could cheer the exploits of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels as Trickster culture heroes. But globe-spanning miscommunication channels and options for international travel allows penny-ante bullshit fountains to escape the milieux where their bullshit was recognised, to find naïve audiences elsewhere and charge top-dollar rents for those imaginary castles.³

So MJS serves as a synecdouche for any number of fake-it-till-you-make-it individuals who succeeded in Science, or who failed entertainingly. Our host will have his own favourite examples, but here are a few of mine.

1. Richard Maximus Fleming, “the US-American quack, antivaxxer, liar, fraudster, debarred doctor, convicted felon, and a former porn actor”. Cheshire can tell that story.
2. “Dr” Darren Fleming – a wannabe Healer and self-styled “Baron Merlona”, so inept in his swindling that in any functioning society he would have sunk to the level of hawking fake designer handbags from a trestle table in a subway station. I am convinced that he trained himself by buying a book through mail-order, “How to Cheat People and Make a Fortune”, only to find that the pages were blank. He found a home for his talents in Australian alt-med scams and rose to a king-pin position there… what he’s up to now is anyone’s guess.
3. Ashutosh Tiwari. Where to begin with Tiwari’s impostures? He deserves credit for recognising that the strongest forces in the universe are academic vanity and entitled expectation of praise, an insight that he operationalised as the IAAM. This is a one-man foundation devoted to awarding completely bogus pseudo-Nobel prizes, in return for attendance at the scamferences that he stages aboard Baltic Sea ferries (rebranding these utilitarian voyages as “cruises”).
   The IAAM operated in synergy with the nanotech fiddle-faddle he was pursuing when we encountered him first, having faked his way into the faculty of Linköping University. Also into the pages of Biosensors and Bioelectronics as the protégé of editor Anthony Turner (who should have retired much earlier rather than waiting for the For Better Science / PubPeer furore).
   These days Tiwari is pretending that his self-proclaimed water-themed scam is an official UN-recognised organisation, comparable to UNESCO or WHO. Before that he was pimping a cellphone app that offered on-line cardiac-health “consultations” with unqualified unknowns, as a substitute for actual medical examinations.
4. Balwant Rai, Space Dentist, never earned the accolade of a post at For Better Science despite attracting the attention of Science Integrity Digest and Riddled (twice); also of Retraction Watch when someone plagiarised his plagiarisms. Rai’s rich fantasy life was not limited to lying about his academic affiliations and Associate Professor status at the Kepler Space Institute. His inventions included a World Dental Association and his own JBR University and JBR Health Education and Research Organization / Institute, with the latter providing cover for the inevitable scamferences (for a while, plagiarising Tiwari’s idea, he staged these on the Copenhagen-Oslo overnight ferry). There was a series of fantasy journals on the topic of his aspirational specialty of Space Dentistry; some of these actually came into existence, as he outsourced the publishing to professional predators like OMICS and SciDoc.
5. Dylan Fazel. Having once edited his parents’ religious-scam newsletter in Minnesota, Dylan began with the dream of being a Science Publisher. He founded the Astronomical Review and vandalised the Wikipedia pages of such eminent scientists as Roland Penrose, inserting his fantasies that they sat on its Editorial Board. These persuaded Taylor & Francis to pay $$$$ for this Salon des Refuses in 2015 (though they cut their losses and closed it in 2017 after one inglorious paper).
   Dylan replaced the hole that it left in his heart by founding a small stable of predatory medical journals. These earned a measure of fame by their relentless spamming and innovative harassment of potential donors of manuscripts and money (and for the cosmopolitan nature of the identities he stole to use as sockpuppets for this spamming and harassment). More recently he reinvented himself as European and evolved into the impresario of the ESMED scamference series. A friend recorded one of these sad affairs for a documentary.
6. What is it with dentists? Ajan Reginald is an incompetent dentist and struck-off fraudster with a string of appearances on For Better Science, on account of his attempts to make a fortune through stem-cell chicanery. He is assisted in his scamming by Nobel Laureate Sir Martin Evans, and would have got away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids Patricia Murray.
   At one point he sought revenge on Leonid (it sounds better if you pronounce it re-ven-gay!! in the French manner) by paying a Repairer of Reputations SEO Consultant to set up discreditable fake websites. The SEO dude was not as expert on website anonymity as he thought, left dumbprints all over the sites, and agreed to take them down in exchange for his name remaining unmentioned.
   Anyway, Ajan invoked DMCA against Google – demanding that For Better Science not show up in the results when people search for his name. If MJS were smarter, he would try this instead of launching salvoes of DMCA strikes against WordPress (though it doesn’t work either).

Clearly MJS could be a better conman (I say that as an admirer of excellence in all fields of human endeavour). Emails and social media posts invite one to read them with charity and understanding, but such interactions only go so far, and any slight flaws in one’s personality become more apparent in face-to-face encounters. Suspicions are further aroused if one cannot suppress one’s self-sabotaging urges and sooner or later things go missing.

Such as the time he joined a book club on one of his stays in Helsinki. The book being about programming a device driver for an embedded microcontroller – a useful skill for a wannabe coder. Our man lasted for four discussions before disappearing, taking with him a copy of the book and the actual microcontroller that he’d been lent.

All this fills me with the sadness of wasted potential. Stephenson has energy, an absence of shame, and a degree of low rat cunning that could accomplish something if only channeled in the right direction. Please, let it not be in politics.

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“- this guy,” Luckman was saying, manicuring a box full of grass, hunched over it as Arctor sat across from him, more or less watching, “appeared on TV claiming to be a world-famous impostor. He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular high-velocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who’d won the Nobel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to -“

“And he got away with all that?” Arctor asked. “He never got caught?”

“The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a world-famous impostor. That came out later in the L.A. Times – they checked up. The guy pushed a broom at Disneyland, or had until he read this autobiography about this world-famous impostor – there really was one – and he said, ‘Hell, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,’ and then he decided, ‘Hell, why do that; I’ll just pose as another impostor.’ He made a lot of bread that way, the Times said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier.”

Philip K Dick (1977)

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Out-takes: A dreary young bank clerk named Fennis

There was no room in the main narrative for the second half of 2023, when MJS (travelling on Canadian passport redacted) wanted to extend his stay in Europe by attending a sharp-shooting competition in Poland. Also to import a rifle.

This belongs to the recently-added “Olympic-level sniper” entry to our man’s portfolio of personae. The Olympic sharp-shooting fantasies now dominate his Twiddle account, to the extent that the header biography now includes a claim of Special Operations Forces veteran status.⁴ ░G░U░N░S░I░N░B░I░O░ !

Perhaps this was inspired by the legendary Winter War exploits of Simo Häyhä – for MJS has invented Finnish / Chinese ancestors and Finnish citizenship. This mingles in his mind with a belief that Finns are unstoppable superwarriors, even admired by Hitler. Someone needs to tell him that Sisu is fictional. “Never try to outdrink a Finn” is as far as I’d go myself, from bitter experience.

This is in line with the experiences of another informant, from MJS’ early-2021 Parkour trip to Istanbul (not included in the main narrative because space):

“He also seems to be obsessed with eugenics and race topics … He would often send me ‘random’ articles of how Hitler looked up to Finnish people as the ‘real Aryans’ and how he was so proud to be Finnish-Chinese or something along those lines, which for me is also an obvious red flag 🚩 … I think he says these things to purposely make others uncomfortable or feel less than him

It was also made obvious that he was into guns and shooting and it is something he talked about quite a bit… and he also had a very dark sense of humour.

He also bragged about such a multitude of things. Being an academic at all these universities, a neurosurgeon, a special forces, been in movies, an Olympic sharp-shooter (also indirect threats and suggestions of gun violence)

That’s when I noticed things getting more shady. a lot of my belongings suddenly went missing, like my Istanbul card to use the subway, and shortly after, my SIM card…

Eventually he also hacked into my email and social media and started randomly messaging people I know pretending to be me (me friends still recall this instance) …what also stood out here is that his device name was Sheep. The name of the girl who he was stalking for 2 and a half years…

When I first met him after an parkour class, he asks me a day later if I could send him $45 on PayPal to send to a girl named [REDACTED] … He said it was ‘for her birthday’ or whatever, and he couldn’t send a gift or something like that, and I gave it him whatever. Yea it was strange but just seemed like a guy who needed help … I looked up who [REDACTED] was and she’s also a Stanford student (Asian).”

How MJS affords all those air-tickets must remain a matter for speculation.

A shout-out and an unsolicited testimonial for Mr Organ. Here NZ journalist David Farrier delved into the manipulative grifter of the title, trying to find the real Michael Organ behind all his fabrications and personae, only to discover that (a) there is no core person there, only more masks and evasion; and (b) one does not just walk away from Mr Organ. 12 / 10, would watch again.

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Feetnotes

1. Mind you, easily persuaded lobsters Cureus editors are gullible enough that a specialised set of papermills talked them into business partnerships: they provide a pipeline to publication in return for the millers providing manuscripts, editors, peer-reviews and $$$. No-one has ever accused Cureus of excessive skepticism.

2. The March 2024 complaint involves “the actual cover of my book, published on their website” – missing the point that all the webpage contained was a link to the front-cover image hosted at Amazon. The November 2023 demand relates to a frame from a YouTube video that MJS had stolen to use as his Twiddle header.

3. Here is the timely story of Matthew Keirans, who stole his victim’s identity so convincingly that authorities imprisoned the real William Woods for years and hospitalised him for clinging stubbornly to the delusion that he was himself (in the face of the fraudster’s more eloquently-expressed claim to that identity).

4. Prometheus (The Poem of Fire) is Scriabin’s Opus 60 – celebrated among color-vision scientists because of the synaesthetic color associations that are part of the score. I am given to believe that it is Sheep’s favourite piece of music, which is why MJS took it for his Twitter nym @PoemOfFire. How much creepier could it be? None more creepy.

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