An associate of mine has been doing this for the past 10 years and he makes a pretty good living doing it. He's done everything from pretending to be a manager of a restaurant to pretending to be a business partner of a desktop support company looking to close more deals. Most of the time he doesn't even say anything. The business owners will put him in an office, place a whole bunch of fake degrees from American schools on the wall and they sign because there is a silver haired white man who fits the stereotypical Western CEO mold.

It's not anything new, it's just that more people have caught on and jumped into the game.

To an extent. It is mainly a source of income for those time rich but money poor.

If a musician or dancer, two roles mentioned in the article, then making a living out of it is the definition of success!

I've also met some non-dancers non-musicians that do it full time. But less misrepresentation, more connection to a career and as a consultant. For example, a chef that visits restaurants when they're opening; while not famous, gets his photo taken enjoying what he's doing.

I did this once for fun (I live in China). Total compensation was around 500-1000$ for one day if I recall correctly. I didn't have to speak to anyone and just sat at a table eating food. It was a fun experience but I wouldn't do it professionally.

Something similar used to be possible by working for chinese companies without any skills, just to be shown around ("company must be successful internationally if it has foreigners on the team"), but supposedly this was a temporary thing (going out of fashion when I heard about it in 2008).

So, back to teaching English I guess :-)

VICE did a segment on it on their HBO show recently. The people in the segment definitely could, one got 2 offers a day. But noone knows how long it'll last.