I am an Electrician and Instrumentation Technician working in New Zealand. I'd say that is the worst advice to give someone regarding a faulting circuit but it's surprising how many people do it. What makes it worse is that when it stops the nuisance tripping but doesn't immediately burn up, the owner often thinks it's all good and the solution becomes temporary-permanent, slowly degrading the insulation until it just falls off. When I started out, I worked for a rural contracting crowd servicing dairy farms and such. We often found objects like nails or fencing wire in fuse folders upstream of the burnt out installations we were there to fix. So dangerous.