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Monday, August 29, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
Increasing Sophistication of Scammers
China-based website bitlifesciences.com (Bit Life Science) has been e-mail targeting researchers and physicians with fronts of conferences that have attendance fees from the hundreds to thousands of dollars. The victims are invited as guest speakers however there is no mention of honorarium or stipends in the invitation. Credit card information is transferred and the conference does not seem to ever materialize.
These conferences often go by some grand global title involving the words: Annual, World, International, Congress, Con, Conference. The heading is completed by a pairing with various fields, such as Vaccine, Forensics, Genetics, Protein and Peptide, Molecular Biology, Cardiology, Cancer, Stem Cell, Microbes, Drug Discovery, Immunodisease, Environment, Greentech, Carbon, Biotechnology. Such Internet hording of conference names is akin to patent trolling or more like domain squatting.
The sophistication is that the webpages of these bogus conferences will feature guest speakers whom are actually known figures in their respective fields. The Scientist investigated by contacting these speakers and uncovered that such speakers were unaware they were being pegged to speak at conferences they never heard of. In addition, the webpages provide apparently convincing conference schedules. The Scientist also contacted the conference centers and found that they too were unaware of themselves hosting such conferences and the bitlifescience contact person was neither in their database nor schedule.
A quick check of bitlifesciences.com by Norton Safe Web and McAfee SightAdvisor both show a clean profile; however, the absence of malware does not mean you are safe from being scammed.
These conferences often go by some grand global title involving the words: Annual, World, International, Congress, Con, Conference. The heading is completed by a pairing with various fields, such as Vaccine, Forensics, Genetics, Protein and Peptide, Molecular Biology, Cardiology, Cancer, Stem Cell, Microbes, Drug Discovery, Immunodisease, Environment, Greentech, Carbon, Biotechnology. Such Internet hording of conference names is akin to patent trolling or more like domain squatting.
The sophistication is that the webpages of these bogus conferences will feature guest speakers whom are actually known figures in their respective fields. The Scientist investigated by contacting these speakers and uncovered that such speakers were unaware they were being pegged to speak at conferences they never heard of. In addition, the webpages provide apparently convincing conference schedules. The Scientist also contacted the conference centers and found that they too were unaware of themselves hosting such conferences and the bitlifescience contact person was neither in their database nor schedule.
A quick check of bitlifesciences.com by Norton Safe Web and McAfee SightAdvisor both show a clean profile; however, the absence of malware does not mean you are safe from being scammed.
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