There's a related phenomenon with young women claiming they're training to be the first person on Mars. They, and usually their parents, carefully craft a media personality where editors and readers fill in the blanks to assume the "astronaut in training" is part of NASA. That the agency exerts little control over its name and logo makes this much easier to accomplish. If a media organization goes through the effort of contacting NASA, they will be told that the "astronaut in training" is not affiliated with NASA. That these young women (for some reason I've yet to see this media manipulation work for young men) attend Space Camp gives them something with NASA on it they can point to so others will make the erroneous assumption they're in NASA astronaut training.

As far as I can tell, nothing they're doing is illegal. Anyone can say they're training to go to Mars. Anyone can buy NASA t-shirts and any child can attend Space Camp. NASA doesn't regulate the use of its name in twitter and Instagram account names. In most cases it appears that the media either doesn't look very deeply into verifying these people are who they're presenting themselves to be or are willing participants in deceiving the public themselves. It makes for a nice article or fills airtime to have on a teenager in a flight suit covered in NASA patches talking about inspiring other youth to follow their path to becoming an astronaut.

But at least the young people in the article and the ones posing as "aspiring astronauts" have more common sense than the young lady who lost her internship with NASA because she was slinging profanities at a member of the agency's advisory board while celebrating her appointment.