> anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job.

I suspect the way this usually gets started is similar to embezzlement schemes. “Oh I’ll just borrow a few dollars from the till and pay it back tomorrow” is akin to “The manuscript is due tonight so I’ll just touch up this microphotograph to look like the other one that had bad focus.”

That escalates into forging invoices on the one hand and completely fabricated data on the other. By that point they’re in too deep to stop until they get caught.