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I'm afraid I have this experience quite a lot because I answer the e-mail for https://www.eff.org/awards/coop https://www.eff.org/awards/coop (which is about

• gus_massa 10y ago
  (I'll repost an old comment of me, with minor changes.) It can be worse. A few years ago (10?) here in Argentina there was a epidemic of "engineers that solved the Goldbach conjecture". A few (maybe 5?) of my math Ph.d. students friends had each one his/her own engineer with a different unrelated proof. The histories where all different, but generally it was a long (100 pages) proof that was tangled up and not very clear. So the math Ph.d. student and the engineer meet weekly for one year to try to understand the proof. It was very painful because they have to understand which part was only unclear or has only small gaps, and which parts had errors that were impossible to fix. And then they had to explain that to the engineer, that were happy to had solved the conjecture. Factorization is "easy" to test with the RSA challenges or a similar numbers. Primality also is "easy" to test. But there is no "easy" test for Goldbach. You must read the complete proof. (Perhaps you can try to convince them to give a small proof of the weak Goldbach conjecture???)