I think it's difficult to eliminate the possibility of a tremendous degree of incompetence, without outright fraud, based just on the p-values near 1. As noted

I think it's difficult to eliminate the possibility of a tremendous degree of incompetence, without outright fraud, based just on the p-values near 1. As noted in other comments here, one possibility is that the authors failed to correctly describe the procedure they used. Sheldrick does consider this, pointing out that even if they actually did try to match subjects, unlike what they said in the paper, it would be very unlikely that they could match them well enough to obtain the reported p-values. But another possibility is that they were totally incompetent at using their statistical software - that the reported p-values are not actually the real p-values for the tests that they said they did. Maybe they accidently used the wrong dataset, for example. Or perhaps they copied numbers from the wrong column of the table the software produced. In a wider sense, though, this would still essentially be fraud - it's dishonest to publish a paper that purports to be a competent study when really you are totally clueless about how to do research, or care so little about correctness that you put no effort into checking that you did things correctly. (And surely they would have to suspect that they don't really know what they're doing...)