Unimaginative French and Swiss people have found luck since websites in their countries, for a financial fee, offer alibis for missing meetings, freeing themselves from unpleasant obligations, or covering up romantic adventures that won’t jeopardize their marriages.
The alibi network has been operating for years in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, and has now expanded to Switzerland and France. The Swiss site Alibi-beton.com provides clients, according to a set price list, with material evidence necessary for lying such as hotel or restaurant bills, invitations to social events, fake phone calls or badges, pens, and flight reservations.
The founder of the site claims to be "very imaginative," but does not accept just anything, having refused to provide an alibi for a young man who did not want to take his exams. In France, where the sites Chez Ibila and Prestige.alibi.com operate, demand will still be "quite limited," claims Claudine Bilan, a social psychologist who sees the expansion of the alibi network as a "sign of Americanization." Bilan, the author of the book "The Psychology of Lying," asserts that clients who turn to the agency shift their responsibility to a third party and are somewhat "perverse." (H)
