kayfabe
- Portraying staged events as real, especially in professional wrestling
Although this is primarily a wrestling term, I think it is a great word to bring into general use. You can read more about it on Wikipedia
It brings to mind the story of Builder.ai – a lauded AI startup that sold an AI solution for creating apps and was valued at $1.5 Billion dollars, but actually just had 700 developers in India working behind the scenes. I guess in this case another term would just be fraud.