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You may not have heard this in the US but we've recently had a number of massive scandals in the UK regarding faked TV and radio phone-in and text votes. This was one of the biggest domestic news stories of last year and for quite a while there were no quizzes or votes on TV or radio that involved any phone or text-ins.
Tactics used by the scam artists included entering their own fake contestents, taking paid for calls after the winner had already been chosen, getting producers' children to pretend to be contestents, "losing" huge numbers of calls in a AI type show and, bizzarely, rigging a "name the cat" vote on a long running kids show.
There were multiple millions of pounds involved and it covered every area of "entertainment" from kids TV to the quiz channels and even charity events. Various senior figures in the industry resigned along with a whole load of more jumior execs and the government, police and courts got drawn into the whole mess. Laws have been ammended and regulatory bodies have been given extra powers to audit and penalise any future offences.
On the whole, the TV companies managed to pass the buck because they don't actually run the phone-ins etc themselves as they contract this out to outside companies but in many cases the public were so angry that they didn't care who made the final decision - it was the TV companies that lost face.
The numbers involved are staggering - one evening's phone in for a primetime show can makes millions and that's in a small country like ours with only 60 million people.
The general attitude here now is that we know all this stuff is about as straight as the average wrestling match but we still enjoy it.
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