David Harbin wrote:

>Interestingly I have seen lots of discussions of the Hatto scandal
>in Gramophone with little discussion on how this reflects on reviewing
>knowledge and standards.  The Hatto recordings obviously ripped off many
>painists and conductors with vastly different styles.  Bearing this in
>mind I still find it extrodinaty that the fakes were not spotted earlier.
>As I said, this raises important questions for reviewers and those who
>read reviews.

Why all this emphasis on blaming reviewers?  It deflects attention from
the real cause of the scam The scam was created by fake identitries in
internet discussion groups long for years before the reviews began big
time.  The Hatto scam was the creation of a number of "personalites" on
the net.  Fantasists, frauds and posers have always been around, but the
net gives them opportunities they never had before.  It's a basic fact
of life which needs to be faced.

Take for example Ernest A Lumpe. Of course he sounds impressive.  He
presses all the right buttons - claiming to own 15000 recordings by small
US labels, somehow accumulated in second hand stors in Germany.  So he
writes articles in journals about scams - that's impressive too, though
perhaps less so when you realise they were written when the scam was
well under way.  But then, notice, despite his "credentials" sniffing
out fakes, he's one of the first to start promoting Hatto without
reservation.  It gives the scammers even greater credibility because
someone like that endorses them.  Um, if anyone had 15000 obscurities,
they's be in a position to be aware that Hatto's discs might "not" be
what they were.  Indeed, so close did Lumpe and Hatto/WBC become that
they called him their greatest publicist!  Later, when Peter Lemken,
a real German queried something, Lumpe went bananas.  When the story
finally broke, you'd think an "expert" on faked recordings would have
been interested.  Instead, Lumpe's website goes offline and he isn't
heard from again.(Or maybe someone with his ID will resurface now!) Maybe
he's real, maybe he's not, as with many of the other "identities" involved,
but the point is that scams work because they are so plausible.  Good
people get fooled.  A lot of the clues come out only in retrospect.

Read the New York Times article again.  A lot of the facts, such as they
are, are there.  No matter how much one might downplay the role of fake
personalities on the net, their existence must be acknowledged.  Honest
people have nothing to fear, in fact, it's they who probably need to be
reminded!  So, focus instead on how the scam began......

Anne
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