A lot of fraudulent companies hire up these guys and pay them to be part of their ‘brand’.
Go back and read up on Bio-Port (the anthrax vaccine maker out of Lansing, Michigan). They went the same route. There are dozens of companies out there with a fraudulent product, and hyped by the big guys.
See "A123."
See "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," published in 1841 by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay. He proposed that crowds of people often behave irrationally, and the 1636 "tulip mania" in the Netherlands was (along with the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Company scheme) one of his primary examples.