Karen C.
Scammers who prey on people by getting them to pay to speak at their sham events
My name and face is being used to advertise an event that I am not speaking at. ConferenceSeries.com are complete scammers. ConferenceSeries.com are advertising a Food Fraud- Food Safety event in Vancouver in October 2022. I was invited to speak and asked them to pay travel + accom. They refused, saying they can’t afford it because they “are belongs to non funding organization” but then offered me the keynote to try to convince me. I refused. I’m certainly not attending and for the reasons I assert below I believe the conference itself is a total sham/fraud. I was contacted from a non-business gmail address. The name in the gmail address is different to the name of the "conference program manager" in the email signature, and different to the email address they used to contact other people in my network (although the name in the signature was the same). The ‘program manager’ Alicia Mary does not exist on LinkedIn. The same non-business gmail address was used to invite me to a virtual event last year, which I did speak at, after refusing to pay the speakers fee (yes, they – tried to - charge me a significant fee to present!). The (supposed) program manager for last year's event, Erin Taylor, also doesn't exist on LinkedIn. The virtual event was execrable. The ‘welcome and introduction session’ started late and consisted of an empty screen for 20 minutes. The MC/host had very poor English language abilities; he did not say who he was; he did not mention the name of the conference; he did not even say the name of the conference/event company; he didn’t welcome attendees and he did not introduce the conference topic with even a single sentence. The quality of the presentations on either side of mine was poor and one of the presentations was completely off-topic. With no audience interaction I’m not sure that there were any live attendees (or live speakers?!) whatsoever. I wasn’t notified of my speaking slot time nor did I receive confirmation the event was even going to happen until 2 days prior, despite repeated requests. I never ‘met’ or talked to the supposed program manager or any human person at any time through the whole process and I am convinced that Alicia Mary and Erin Taylor are not real people. This group are complete scammers who prey on people by getting them to pay to speak at their sham events. I’m appalled they are using my name and face on their webpage and have taken action this morning to have it removed. Edit: If you want to help prevent more people from getting scammed there are three things you can do. (1) Make sure to report any fraudulent transactions to your bank (the bank will seek a refund from conferenceseries via their credit card processor, Stripe. Too many disputed transactions will prompt Stripe to suspend services for conferenceseries); (2) write to stripe.com ("info @") and tell them that conferenceseries.com is using the Stripe payment gateway to process credit cards for fraud and ask them to cancel the company's stripe account. (3) find all their company profiles on LinkedIn (I found 6 today) and for each one, file a scam report with LinkedIn. To do this, open their company Linkedin profile page. Click 'More', choose 'Report abuse' then choose "Suspicious fake or scam" and report them for defrauding people.



