Article: When Conferences Lie

Be a speaker. Serve on the organizing committee. Present your abstract. Sounds like traditional association conferences’ calls for subject matter experts. But it’s also how fake and predatory events reach out to students, academics, and professionals across a swath of industries. Providing little or no substance, these events — if they even take place at all — not only create confusion in the market, they siphon off the very same audiences legitimate events work so hard to attract and educate. What can be done?