I was asked to implement something like this at a web startup years ago (since folded): I was supposed to juice the number of active users in the last month by

I was asked to implement something like this at a web startup years ago (since folded): I was supposed to juice the number of active users in the last month by a large random number in the range of 50,000-100,000 or so. I refused saying I didn't want to lie to our customers. My boss said, "it's not for them, it's for the board". Which, needless to say, was even more reason to refuse. They assigned it to another engineer. The new "feature" was deployed. He forgot to round the random number. So let's just say the home page reported the number of active users with very fine precision. Unfortunately it was quickly fixed.