Adversarial examples crafted by an explicit adversary have attracted
significant attention in machine learning. However, the security risk posed by
a potential false friend has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we unveil
the threat of hypocritical examples -- inputs that are originally misclassified
yet perturbed by a false friend to force correct predictions. While such
perturbed examples seem harmless, we point out for the first time that they
could be maliciously used to conceal the mistakes of a substandard (i.e., not
as good as required) model during an evaluation. Once a deployer trusts the
hypocritical performance and applies the "well-performed" model in real-world
applications, unexpected failures may happen even in benign environments. More
seriously, this security risk seems to be pervasive: we find that many types of
substandard models are vulnerable to hypocritical examples across multiple
datasets. Furthermore, we provide the first attempt to characterize the threat
with a metric called hypocritical risk and try to circumvent it via several
countermeasures. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the countermeasures,
while the risk remains non-negligible even after adaptive robust training.