"It looks really bad for him, because when you go through those three possibilities, he's the only one that would have a motive to do this," says co-author. "He doesn't touch the data. He doesn't do data analysis." The insurance company could be trying to keep their relationship with dan alive so they can get money from his research. But it is more likely that someone at the survey company dropped the ball and actually didn't have the data ready - then somebody just made up a bunch of values. And here's a thing, it does look bad for dan. It's just that i such a dumb way of faking data that it's hard to see dan