re: [Air-l] conference request
Further to list talk about bogus conferences, I was involved in a little espionage work trying to track down some 'conference' organisers in 2002. A delegate to a pre-WSIS conference I attended, a nice guy from Nepal, told me a story about how his NGO had been approached to attend a conference in Brighton. After visiting the conference website and communicating with the organisers, his NGO stumped up the $400 dollars in registration fees and waited to receive more information. You can guess what happened next. I too visited the website (I worked for Brighton libraries for 4 years) and it was a pretty good job - if you didn't know the town (www.ngosummit2002.4t.com - it's still there, along with a picture of London on the front page!). Perhaps the full story should be related to anyone interested off list, but suffice to say it seemed to be quite an elaborate scam. If anyone is interested I'd be happy to relate it. It seems that there must be a market for this sort of thing out there, in the same way as the 419 situation... Stuart Stuart Hamilton IFLA/FAIFE PhD Student Royal School of Library and Information Science Birketinget 6 Copenhagen Denmark -----Original Message----- From: air-l-request@aoir.org To: air-l@aoir.org Sent: 5/4/04 6:01 PM Subject: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #1049 - 5 msgs Send Air-l mailing list submissions to air-l@aoir.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to air-l-request@aoir.org You can reach the person managing the list at air-l-admin@aoir.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Air-l digest..." Today's Topics: 1. conference request (Wasserman Herman <hwasser@sun.ac.za>) 2. Re: re: IPSI conference (Jillana Enteen) 3. Re: re: IPSI conference (robert m. tynes) 4. Re: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #1047 - 1 msg (Caroline Haythornthwaite) 5. Final Programme and Keynote Speaker (Charles Ess) --__--__-- Message: 1 Date: Mon, 3 May 2004 18:04:45 +0200 From: "Wasserman Herman <hwasser@sun.ac.za>" <hwasser@sun.ac.za> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Subject: [Air-l] conference request Reply-To: air-l@aoir.org Robert and Elijah mention a seemingly bogus conference call. I also got = one. Would be interested in finding out what's behind it. Herman
It seems to me that there are three distinct types of situations: (1) Mass unsolicited emails for "legitimate" conferences (i.e., scholarly conferences associated with established professional associations) (2) Mass unsolicited emails for fly-by-night for-profit conferences (i.e., the conferences themselves occur, but they are evidently run for commercial rather than scholarly purposes, often by mysterious groups with no apparent connection to established academic organizations) (3) Mass unsolicited emails for non-existent conferences (i.e., pure scams in which the supposed conference does not even take place). There's obviously a lot of grey area between the first and second categories. And, as much as we might find objectionable about the second category, it's obviously very distinct from the third category. Mark -- Mark Warschauer Associate Professor, Dept. of Education and Dept. of Informatics University of California, Irvine tel: (949) 824-2526, fax: (949) 824-2965 markw@uci.edu; http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw
participants (2)
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Hamilton, Stuart -
Mark Warschauer