Here are the sources, in case anyone asks. Every trick in the game points to something that actually happened: fines, verdicts, expos茅s, or perfectly legal industry practice.
Paid comment armies
In 2013, Samsung was fined roughly 340,000 dollars by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission for hiring students and bloggers to bash rival HTC in online forums. The agency running the campaign sent Samsung weekly reports with comment tallies and achievement rates. Trolling run as a consulting project, complete with KPIs and status meetings.
Sources: VentureBeat 路 Slate
Closer to home: in 2021 the Danish Chamber of Commerce reported a company to the police for fake Trustpilot reviews, and Trustpilot itself received a multi-million kroner fine for insufficient review controls.
Sources: Dansk Erhverv 路 DR
Protesters for hire
Crowds on Demand is an American company that has openly rented out protesters, fans and "concerned citizens" since 2012, at 100-300 dollars per person. In 2018 the company was sued by a Czech investor who claimed a rival had hired protesters to march outside his private home.
Sources: Wikipedia 路 InfluenceWatch
The agency pitches the story
In 2011 Facebook hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to quietly pitch critical stories about Google's privacy practices to journalists and bloggers. The firm refused to say who its client was. One blogger published the whole email exchange, and Facebook had to admit it was behind the campaign. The playbook is classic: the agency talks to the press, the competitor gets the story, and the client's name appears nowhere.
Source: The Guardian
The TV tip
Consumer watchdog shows live on tips and have exposed everything from tax fraud to systematic scams. The shows do important work. The real-world pattern is simply that a habit is often shared by an entire industry, while the one company featured in the episode carries the story. In the game, you're the one sending the tip. The Danish cards name two beloved national institutions: DR's Kontant and TV 2's Operation X.
Sources: DR on Kontant 路 TV 2 Operation X
The PR firm's own news site
In 2018 Facebook hired the PR firm Definers, which planted negative stories about Google, Apple and others through its own news site, NTK Network, and tried to tie Facebook's critics to George Soros. Facebook fired the firm when the New York Times exposed the arrangement.
Sources: Forbes 路 TechCrunch
It can also bring down the agency itself: Britain's Bell Pottinger ran a covert campaign for the Gupta family in South Africa using fake accounts and the hashtag #WhiteMonopolyCapital. The industry's own association expelled the firm in 2017, and it collapsed shortly after.
The bought watchdog
Walmart and Oracle backed the Free and Fair Markets Initiative, a seemingly independent watchdog organization whose actual purpose was to criticize Amazon. The tobacco industry used the same move in the 80s and 90s with artificial "smokers' rights" groups fighting smoking bans.
Source: Study.com on astroturfing
Fake accounts at scale
The Wiki-PR scandal of 2013: more than 250 user accounts were banned from Wikipedia for paid editing of company articles. Wikimedia subsequently tightened its rules so that paid editing must be openly disclosed.
Source: Wikipedia on the Wiki-PR scandal
And the Devumi case: the company sold millions of fake followers and likes from bot accounts, often built on real people's stolen identities. The New York Times exposed it in 2018, the company shut down the same year, and settlements with the New York attorney general and the FTC followed.
Sources: New York Attorney General 路 On the FTC settlement
Shell companies and tax havens
The Panama Papers leak of 2016: 11.5 million documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca exposed shell companies belonging to politicians, corporations and celebrities in more than 200 countries. The Paradise Papers followed a year later.
Source: ICIJ
The Nordic contribution: through Danske Bank's small Estonian branch flowed roughly 200 billion euros between 2007 and 2015, mostly from customers outside Estonia. In 2022 the bank pleaded guilty in the US and paid more than two billion dollars.
Sources: SEC 路 Greenberg Traurig on the settlement
Dividend tax
The Danish dividend tax case: until 2015, the Danish treasury was defrauded of roughly 12.7 billion kroner through illegitimate dividend tax refunds. The case led to trials in several countries and ranks among the biggest fraud cases in Danish history.
Source: Wikipedia on the CumEx files
In 2024 the main figure, Sanjay Shah, was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Danish court, the harshest sentence for financial crime in Danish history. He has appealed.
Source: DR
Data breaches
The 2017 Equifax breach hit 147 million people and ended in a settlement of at least 575 million dollars with US authorities.
Source: FTC
Uber went another way: when hackers took data on 57 million users in 2016, the company paid them 100,000 dollars to stay quiet and booked the amount as a bug bounty. The chief security officer was convicted in 2022 for covering up the breach.
Sources: US Department of Justice 路 Bloomberg
Greenwashing
In the game, a polished green image can make a shitstorm bounce off, regardless of what goes on behind the facade. In reality, regulators have caught on: Danish and EU authorities have tightened documentation requirements for climate claims in marketing, precisely because the move worked so well.
Source: The Danish Consumer Ombudsman
The seven-year phone war
Apple and Samsung spent 2011 to 2018 suing each other across the globe while trading billions in components with each other at the same time. The case about the iPhone's rounded corners ended in 2018 with 539 million dollars to Apple, after which the parties settled. The largest design patent case in history was about who gets to sell a rectangle with rounded corners.
Sources: Bloomberg 路 Insurance Journal
The dumpster
In 2000 Oracle admitted to hiring private investigators who tried to buy the trash of organizations arguing Microsoft's case during the antitrust trial. The detective agency offered the cleaning staff 1,200 dollars for the garbage. Larry Ellison later called it a civic duty.
Sources: Time 路 The Register
HP went a step further in 2006: the board chair had private investigators obtain phone records of journalists and board members by impersonating them. The chair had to step down, one investigator pleaded guilty, and HP settled with the journalists it had surveilled.
Sources: Wikipedia on the HP scandal 路 Washington Post
Threaten a lawsuit
When Financial Times journalists dug into the payments company Wirecard, the journalists were reported to the police by Germany's financial regulator for market manipulation, and short selling of the stock was banned. Eighteen months later 1.9 billion euros were missing from the books, the management was on the run, and the charges against the journalists were dropped: their reporting was accurate.
Sources: Wikipedia on the Wirecard scandal 路 ESMA on the short ban
The short report
In 2020 the short seller Hindenburg Research published a report on the electric truck company Nikola, pointing out among other things that the company's promotional video showed a truck simply rolling downhill. The founder was convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years. The report was also a business: Hindenburg had shorted the stock and profited from the fall.
Sources: CNBC on the verdict 路 CNBC on the sentence
The lookalikes
Lookalike products are a billion-dollar industry, and the courts go both ways. The cider: Thatchers won its January 2025 appeal against Aldi's lookalike, with the court finding the similarity was meant to tell shoppers "like Thatchers, only cheaper". The cookies: Oreo maker Mondelez sued Aldi in May 2025 over copied packaging, and that case is still running. The chair: Stokke has won copyright cases over the Tripp Trapp chair in several countries, but lost the trademark on the shape itself at the EU Court of Justice.
Sources: IPKat on the Thatchers ruling 路 CNN 路 INTA on Tripp Trapp
And the Danish ceramics war: the Maritime and Commercial Court ordered TV nutritionist Christian Bitz and wholesaler F&H to pay 6.4 million kroner to ceramicist Kasper W眉rtz, because 15 products in Bitz's stoneware series were imitations of W眉rtz's handmade ceramics. The case ended years later in a confidential settlement.
Sources: DR 路 Jyllands-Posten
The deal not to steal each other's people
Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe made secret agreements not to recruit each other's employees. It held down wages for tens of thousands of engineers, and in 2015 a judge approved a 415 million dollar settlement for roughly 64,000 workers. In the game, the headhunt is an attack. In reality it was so valuable that the ban on it was a cartel.
Sources: TechCrunch 路 NBC News
Fan the strike
Tesla refused to sign a collective agreement in Sweden, and in October 2023 IF Metall's mechanics went on strike. Then it spread: dockworkers in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland blocked Tesla cars, electricians dropped Tesla jobs, and the postal service withheld license plates for new Teslas. The conflict became one of Sweden's longest ever and ended in August 2026, after 1,021 days, when Tesla had bought out the last strikers. In the game, you are the one fanning your neighbour's strike.
Sources: The Register 路 Electrek
The non-compete
For years the sandwich chain Jimmy John's had hourly sandwich makers sign agreements barring them, for two years, from working for competitors within about two miles of any Jimmy John's store. The attorneys general of New York and Illinois struck the clauses down in 2016, and the chain dropped them and paid 100,000 dollars.
The consultants' report
McKinsey advised Purdue Pharma on how to "turbocharge" OxyContin sales in the middle of the opioid crisis. Internally the plan was called Evolve to Excellence. The consulting firm has since paid 573 million dollars in settlements with US states and a further 650 million to the federal authorities.
Sources: NPR 路 US Department of Justice
The commissioned study
In the 1960s the sugar industry paid Harvard researchers for review articles that cleared sugar and pointed to fat as the culprit behind heart disease. The payment was never disclosed, and the articles shaped dietary advice for decades. The documents only surfaced in 2016. In the game, studies are attack cards. That is not a coincidence.
Hire the minister's son
JPMorgan ran an internal program in Asia called Sons and Daughters: children of Chinese officials and executives got jobs and internships, prioritized by the business their parents could refer to the bank. The bank paid 264 million dollars in 2016 to close the case.
The Nordic parallel: Sweden's Telia paid more than 330 million dollars to a shell company owned by the Uzbek president's daughter to enter the country's telecom market. The 2017 global settlement cost 965 million dollars.
And a Danish case still running: when the British defence group Babcock set out to bid on Denmark's multi-billion purchase of new frigates, it hired the foreign minister's son, Bergur L酶kke Rasmussen, to handle contact with Danish politicians and ministries. Spokespeople from several parties called the arrangement nepotism; he himself rejects any conflict of interest. The case is not settled.
The revolving door
When former European Commission president Jos茅 Manuel Barroso became chairman of Goldman Sachs International in 2016, advising on Brexit, it triggered a case at the EU ombudsman, a petition with 80,000 signatures and longer cooling-off periods for departing commissioners. The door swings both ways: companies lend experts to the system, and the system's people move out to the companies they used to watch.
Sources: LSE 路 Corporate Europe Observatory
The Uber Files leak also showed that former EU digital commissioner Neelie Kroes contacted senior Dutch officials on Uber's behalf while she was still within her cooling-off period and had been explicitly refused permission to work for the company.
Sources: European Parliament 路 DutchNews
Write the bill yourself
An investigation by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity found more than 10,000 bills in US state legislatures copied almost word for word from templates written by interest groups and corporations. More than 2,100 of them became law.
Source: Center for Public Integrity
Paid questions in the chamber
Cash for questions, 1994: Two British MPs took money, up to 2,000 pounds per question and reportedly delivered in brown envelopes, to ask questions in the House of Commons on behalf of the owner of Harrods. The scandal ended their careers and cost their party one of its safest seats.
Sources: Yahoo News UK 路 Tobacco Tactics (University of Bath)
The useful regulation
When the US Congress gave the FDA power over tobacco in 2009, market leader Philip Morris supported the law and helped write it. Competitors dubbed it the Marlboro Monopoly Act: the marketing restrictions froze market shares, and the market leader had the most to freeze.
The think tank
Over twenty years ExxonMobil channeled more than 36 million dollars to think tanks and groups sowing doubt about climate science, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Sources: Union of Concerned Scientists 路 DeSmog
The friendship at city hall
The Danish Farum case: Mayor Peter Brixtofte had the municipality pay nine million kroner over price for a sports hall renovation, in return for the contractor sponsoring the town's handball club with ten million. He got two years in prison for gross abuse of office, upheld by the Danish Supreme Court in 2008.
Sources: DR 路 Lex on the Farum case
It will cost jobs
When Amazon put its second headquarters up for bid in 2017, 238 cities bid with tax breaks and grants. New Jersey alone offered seven billion dollars. The promise of 50,000 jobs made cities pay to be chosen.
Sources: Brookings 路 BuzzFeed News
The promises do not always hold: in 2017 Foxconn promised Wisconsin 13,000 jobs and 10 billion dollars of investment in exchange for billions in subsidies. In 2021 the deal was renegotiated down to 1,454 jobs and a subsidy cap of 80 million dollars.
State aid with a tax card
Ireland's tax rulings gave Apple an effective corporate tax rate as low as 0.005 percent. In 2024 the EU Court of Justice finally ruled the arrangements were illegal state aid, and Apple had to pay back 13 billion euros. The subsidies per step of Political Influence are the game's version of the same handshake.
And LuxLeaks: documents leaked in 2014 showed that Luxembourg had granted tailored, confidential tax deals to several hundred multinational companies.
Source: ICIJ on LuxLeaks
Cartels in the tenders
The Danish road marking case: the country's two largest road marking companies bid together as a "consortium" on the Road Directorate's tenders, with districts divided in advance and joint prices. The Supreme Court found the consortium illegal in 2019, and the High Court made the violation criminal in 2024.
Sources: Danish Competition Authority 路 On the criminal case
And the Atea case, the largest bribery case in Danish history: public officials received trips, dinners and equipment from a special account while their region bought IT for more than half a billion kroner from the supplier. Eight people were convicted in 2018, and the sentences were increased on appeal.
Sources: Danish Courts 路 TV 2
Greenwashing at scale
Volkswagen installed cheating software in eleven million diesel cars so they passed the test in the lab and polluted up to 40 times the limit on the road. The bill passed 30 billion dollars, and the company pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the US.
Sources: US Department of Justice 路 EPA
Fund giant DWS marketed itself as an ESG leader until police raided its Frankfurt headquarters. The fines ended at 25 million euros in Germany and 19 million dollars at the SEC, and the CEO stepped down. The case started with an internal whistleblower.
Sources: ESG Today 路 ESG Today on the SEC fine
All cases are described from publicly available sources such as fines, verdicts, settlements and press coverage. None of the companies or shows mentioned have any connection to Ruthless Returns. The game is satire: the methods are real, the companies in the game are not.