The most effective way to flatter an energy claim is not to lie about the measurement. It is to choose the conditions and then not mention them. Speed, payload, gait, ambient temperature and the fraction of the shift spent moving are all legitimate operating choices, all of them move the answer, and none of them is required on a spec sheet. Cost of transport is defined as power over mass, gravity and velocity, so it is not even constant for one machine: it varies with gait and speed, which means a vendor quoting a single number has silently chosen a point. This is not fraud and treating it as fraud misses the mechanism. It is the ordinary consequence of publishing a scalar for a function, and it is why a report needs its conditions attached rather than a stricter honesty requirement.