Well, this is extreme.
But in all seriousness, it's rare for someone to commit fraud on this scale, and even rarer for someone to expect fame from it.
It's much more common to be in a position where your grant obligations require you to publish 4 articles in a year, and the topic didn't turn out to be as good as you initially expected, so what do you do? Just take the samples that actually worked at least barely, at least once, apply the logic of "well, it did work once, it doesn't matter that two other replication attempts brought the catalysis efficiency twice as low, one sample is enough for a proof of concept, let's write a whole paper based on that", and here we have a manuscript that contains inflated data, maybe because the conditions were successful this time, or maybe because someone had previously polished platinum on the same surface that the electrode for the catalysis was polished on. Who knows? Who cares? At least you won't starve for a year until you have to do it again.
Not trying to justify such behaviour, just providing some sort of explanation of why this happens at least in some cases.
Almost everyone I know in chemistry. Almost no one I know in physics. Things are weird that way.