Landing Pages + Fake "Featured In" Logos - is this common?

While analyzing some of my competitor's landing pages I came across a case where someone put logos of popular news sites (BBC, Newsweek, NYT) without and links or quotes on their landing page. Obviously this is supposed to function as social proof, but a Google search for the company name on these sites didn't turn up anything. Furthermore, nothing like "as featured in" was written on the landing page, so that technically they are not making any claims. Anyway, putting the logos there certainly suggests that they've been features in above sites. I am just wondering, how common is this practice? What do you think about it? They certainly fooled me sine I would usually never click on any of these links anyway. And I'm not the typical non-tech-savvy user either.