Let me tell you a story of a self-promoter from Italy.
This individual has been active for more than 10 years. He's promoted himself as an world record holding programmer, a metaverse expert, a university professor, the owner of an academic cheating service, a politician, and more recently an honorary consul and knighted individual.
He created an article on a programming competition 10 years ago on Italian Wikipedia. The article was created specifically to promote himself as a record holder in the competition. He was actually a record holder for a period, but not in any notable sense.
He uploaded a couple of academic articles to Wiki Commons covering a school he'd created in Second Life. He also wrote a book on Second Life which he attempted to integrate into numerous articles on Italian Wikipedia in 2014.
He managed to score a position at an upstart online university in 2015. He created an article on Simple English Wikipedia and incorporated himself as faculty. He created numerous fake articles off Wikipedia about his new position to use as sources. Reports online suggest he lied about his academic credentials and was subsequently canned after a month.
He ran an academic cheating service which helped students circumvent anti-plagiarism tools for several years (~2016-2018). There are several English Wikipedia articles with histories littered by links to his LinkedIn articles promoting the service and links to the service itself.
He ran in the 2018 Italian elections through his own political party with his mother. I found on Wikipedia evidence of him promoting this party going back to 2015. He tried to create articles on the party numerous times, and he also integrated the party's website into several articles which were later removed. My favorite one was where he utilized an article about a plane crash to promote a "memorial service" by his party. There were a lot of unanswered questions about his candidacy at the time.
He most recently tried to recreate his own English Wikipedia article by claiming to be an honorary consul for Panama in the US and British Virgin Islands. This prevent the article from being deleted right away. He needed a source to support his claim, so he created a website.
He registered a .org domain. The naked domain redirected to the Panamanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. He copied that site's look and feel to create a page about his being an honorary consul. This was also the source for him being a knight in the Order of Vasco Núñez de Balboa.
He also copied an MIT website under another newly registered domain to support his claim to graduate education. It contained a single article about him.
This doesn't include the multitude of websites that he runs attacking people and institutions who've "crossed him" in the past. He edits numerous Wikipedia articles to try and slant the tables against these people and organizations.
He's been blocked on Wikipedia numerous times. Counting the number of socks that I'm aware of the number is 20+, but that doesn't include his use of IP edits. They're usually on his home ISP, but he sometimes uses rented residential IPs.
It's mind blowing the depths this guy goes to promote himself.
This individual has been active for more than 10 years. He's promoted himself as an world record holding programmer, a metaverse expert, a university professor, the owner of an academic cheating service, a politician, and more recently an honorary consul and knighted individual.
He created an article on a programming competition 10 years ago on Italian Wikipedia. The article was created specifically to promote himself as a record holder in the competition. He was actually a record holder for a period, but not in any notable sense.
He uploaded a couple of academic articles to Wiki Commons covering a school he'd created in Second Life. He also wrote a book on Second Life which he attempted to integrate into numerous articles on Italian Wikipedia in 2014.
He managed to score a position at an upstart online university in 2015. He created an article on Simple English Wikipedia and incorporated himself as faculty. He created numerous fake articles off Wikipedia about his new position to use as sources. Reports online suggest he lied about his academic credentials and was subsequently canned after a month.
He ran an academic cheating service which helped students circumvent anti-plagiarism tools for several years (~2016-2018). There are several English Wikipedia articles with histories littered by links to his LinkedIn articles promoting the service and links to the service itself.
He ran in the 2018 Italian elections through his own political party with his mother. I found on Wikipedia evidence of him promoting this party going back to 2015. He tried to create articles on the party numerous times, and he also integrated the party's website into several articles which were later removed. My favorite one was where he utilized an article about a plane crash to promote a "memorial service" by his party. There were a lot of unanswered questions about his candidacy at the time.
He most recently tried to recreate his own English Wikipedia article by claiming to be an honorary consul for Panama in the US and British Virgin Islands. This prevent the article from being deleted right away. He needed a source to support his claim, so he created a website.
He registered a .org domain. The naked domain redirected to the Panamanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. He copied that site's look and feel to create a page about his being an honorary consul. This was also the source for him being a knight in the Order of Vasco Núñez de Balboa.
He also copied an MIT website under another newly registered domain to support his claim to graduate education. It contained a single article about him.
This doesn't include the multitude of websites that he runs attacking people and institutions who've "crossed him" in the past. He edits numerous Wikipedia articles to try and slant the tables against these people and organizations.
He's been blocked on Wikipedia numerous times. Counting the number of socks that I'm aware of the number is 20+, but that doesn't include his use of IP edits. They're usually on his home ISP, but he sometimes uses rented residential IPs.
It's mind blowing the depths this guy goes to promote himself.