It sounds to me like the Crazy Eddie scam from the late eighties. While securing financing from Wall Street, Crazy Eddie took the bankers on tours of its various warehouses in New York. And had workers populate the next warehouse to be visited with inventory from one of the already visited locations, making their inventory physically apppear to be 2-3x as large as it was in reality. Enough to make the valuation lies told by their books look true.