As I've often said about the DailyWTF stories, if this story isn't real, one just like it has happened hundreds or thousands of times. It's an outlier, yes, but not something I'd even blink at having had happen to someone, somewhere, at some point. I've only done several dozen interviews and I haven't seen anything that extreme, but I've seen enough stuff that I wouldn't find it that shocking.

(Or, somebody did try to snow me to that extreme but failed to get to the point where we even cared about checking references. I don't mean this as any sort of triumphalism, but just by its nature, it's easier to BS your way through a a management interview than a technical interview. I'd say that's less about one necessarily being "harder" and certainly not about one being "better", but that there's a much larger set of distinct things we may talk about in a tech interview. If you really don't know anything technical, you have much greater odds of getting something asked that rats you out.)