We've mentioned before the Recording Industry astroturfing site in Canada, called "Balanced Copyright for Canada," which is about anything but setting up a "balanced" copyright system in Canada. However, apparently, there was a recent "debate" on that group's Facebook page about some poor Canadian band (who I'm not going to bother naming, for reasons that should become obvious), who put out a press release claiming that it had "gone platinum," if unauthorized downloads were counted. The band claimed that its album had been downloaded over 100,000 times, and complained about people "stealing" from them.

Of course, one curious participant in the debate, Wayne Borean, began to question this press release. He went out and searched the various torrent search engines/trackers, and even searched Google with the filetype:torrent search and came up with no results. In other words, it's not just unlikely that the band's work has been shared 100,000 unauthorized times, it's unlikely that it's being shared at all. TorrentFreak jumped into the fray, and noticed very few Twitter followers, and almost no YouTube views on the band's channel, and also began suspecting stuff. After pressing the band's manager for "proof," TorrentFreak discovered that it came from an search form that returns fake results.

Thus, it does not appear that the band purposely mislead people, but it appears that they don't seem to realize that you can do searches on pretty much any made up thing on certain sites and it will tell you there are tons of results. Of course, since this info has been presented, the band claims that "the music thieves are after us now." Or, they're not. Which might actually be a bigger problem for the band.