I don't think it's true that eventually we are catching this fraud :( This keeps happening because so much is out there, it doesn't follow that all or even most of it is being caught. Even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent being caught would yield a constant stream of such stories. I have a collection of articles on my blog dating back years that cover various fraudulent papers in different fields, and even whole fields in which the bulk of all papers are based on fraud (e.g. the literature dealing with misinformation bots on Twitter). None of them have ever been retracted or even had any of the problems be acknowledged outside of the blogosphere.

It's really hard to understand the scale of the problem until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged or retracted. In particular there's a nasty attitude problem in which reports of fraud from outside the academic institutions will frequently be written off as "right wing" and thus inherently illegitimate. This can happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or whether it's in any way political. Literally, things like bug reports or reports of numbers that don't add up can be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It's really a mess.