I’m writing this for a friend who tweeted this article to me. Feel free to listen in. Mate, this in an intervention, don’t believe what you read in Forbes. Please.

Lets take yesterday’s post Nearly Half Of BlackBerry Z10 Buyers Switching From iPhone And Android by Agustino Fontevecchia.

BlackBerry’s new smartphone is stealing iPhone and Android users, according to a recent note by RBC Capital markets, which shows 45% of those buying Z10s converted from the two leading operating systems.

The first line of the article proves it’s made-up. Let me show you.

The reporter’s source is RBC Capital Markets (Ed: the ‘M’ is capitalized, dude, unless that’s not the real source, RBC Capital is an even bigger fish) but the actual source person is not named. So it’s a theoretical unnamed source who works for either RBC Capital or RBC Capital Markets, a trading company that is free to express its opinion on the market. The source is not a trustworthy market research company or a carrier or even BlackBerry itself.

Then later in the article, they credit RBC Research (not the unnamed analyst now) with predicting a 45% switch rate. Wait, what? The first sentence makes out that it has already happened, yet later they contradict themselves by saying that’s what the research team predicts! The word “stealing” in the first line implies present tense, the word “estimates” later on implies future made-up stuff.

And then there’s this, free time travel folks. The article is dated March 14. BlackBerry Z10’s go on sale on, let me see (doing real research):

• AT&T: March 22 - no data there.
• Verizon: March 28 - no data there.
• T-Mobile: March 11 - er, preorders for business customers only, no sales data reported yet, so no frakking data there either! Public gets it on March 24, no data there.

So how is it possible for 45% of new BlackBerry Z10 owners to be switchers when they cannot be owners yet!

I have not gotten past the first sentence of the article and we already know it is bullshit.

But lets give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume their source has T-Mobile’s internal pre-order data, which we know they do not. 45%? Really, a nicely rounded, just less than 50% number? I smell a steaming pile of made-up number here. What’s the probability that exactly 45% of the pre-orders from existing T-Mobile customers that they know are using Apples and Androids? Oh wait, these are corporate pre-orders, bulk buying, so the final distribution of these devices is unknown to T-Mobile . Which means what these devices are replacing is, you guessed it, unknown.

There’s no point reading the rest of this Forbes link-bait, too bad it had over 30,000 views when I posted this.

Follow the author as @hiltmon on Twitter and @hiltmon on App.Net. Mute #xpost on one.