At a ceremony at the French national assembly attended by Nobel prize winners, former government ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all attention was on a previously unknown literature professor.

Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled figure in an ill-fitting suit and rosé-coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology - the study of linguistics – from an international society of the same name.

Montaclair was the first French recipient of the medal, previously awarded to the Italian author and linguist Umberto Eco, those attending were told.

It was a glittering event and an impressive achievement – but unfortunately, detectives claim, the award itself was entirely fake and part of a complex international hoax worthy of a film script.

Although the ceremony did take place, there was no International Society of Philology. The American university to which it was supposedly affiliated existed only online and its address was traced to a jewellery store in Lewes, Delaware. The award – likened to a Nobel prize – was invented by Montaclair, and the academic had bought the medal from a jeweller in Paris for €250 to present to himself.

[...]

The labyrinthine investigation now centres on whether Montclair, employed at the Marie and Louis Pasteur University, a teacher training college in Besançon, used the fake medal and a “doctorate” from the University of Philology and Education in the US to obtain a promotion and pay rise.

The lengths some people go to get an academic promotion...