The Congress and the Congress

Lawks a'mercy! Is there no end to the excitement? [Spoiler alert ---- NO]. One checks the Riddled mailbox, eagerly hoping that the Brewers After Dark 2017 Nude Calendar one ordered from that special website has finally arrived, only to find a personalised, cajoling invitation to a Conference. One's heart is all a-flutter as one spits a mouthful of Spargelpony Asparagus Witbier.

The specific nature of the meeting is not clear from the missive, which is a chimaeric mosaic of sorts, a kind of quantum wavefunction superposition: it vacillates between expecting my company at MHF-2017 [Mental Health Forum], and HCC-2017 [Health Care Congress]... not to mention ICN-2017 [International Conference of Neuroscience], and ILCS-2017 [International Lung Cancer Symposium]. Could these all be the same meeting, viewed from different perspectives in the manner of Rashōmon? Perhaps attendees will wear colour-coded clothing, and will be issued with bandpass goggles that only allow them to see other members of the conference they selected. Perhaps the organisers, having booked a particular venue for a particular weekend, are naturally eager to maximise their ROI by luring suckers there on as many different pretexts as possible.

Congress facilities were not as advertised

So the Coordinator of this congress lacks coordinatory capacity over the template for the spammograms she signs. Also she continues the theme of denominative ambiguity. With only an initial in the place of a surname, the semi- anonymous Marie E. appears to have stepped straight from the adhesive pages of Victorian pornography... along with the forbidding but hotblooded Marquise de P., Brigadier Arbuthnot F. of the __^th Fusiliers, and saucy demi-mondaine Daphne W.

Following the links from the "Pioneer Century Science" conference pages leads us to Global Century Science Group, the parent organisation, organ-grinder to the monkey. Its site consists largely of a list of destinations and a general theme of getting people to them by any means short of abduction. That is to say, GCSG is primarily a travel agency that has fallen upon hard times and has been reduced to walking the mockademic-meeting side of the street.

One has long imagined that automation had taken over the process of scouring antisocial networks and publishers' websites for e-addresses of suckers to harass with solicitous spambuscades, i.e. that conference grifters rely on software. How it will cheer you, gentle reader, to learn that great corporations like PCS retain the personal touch... they outsource the dirty work to Mumbai. There are things that software scripts have too much pride and principle to do.*

"Collect data and potential speaker' -s contacts by professional publications or keywords from internet resources"

So there is a career pathway: study for a B.Sc or Masterate or Pharmacy degree, qualify for a career of stalking academics for their contact details so Chinese conmen can target them. The vocational-guidance advisors at school never mentioned this particular match to one's aptitudes. O brave new world, that has such job niches in't! Oh globalisation!!

Smut burying a lede

But perhaps one is burying the lede here. For there are SHOCKING REVELATIONS: Only last year, one Iris Fu from the BIT Life Sciences Group was badgering John Podesta to attend and speak at the 6th Low Carbon & Green Growth Earth Summit. The invitation does not mention the $1300 registration fee levied upon speakers and non-speakers alike. Wikileaks has the full story, brought to us by way of Julian Assange, Russian hackers and vulnerable e-mail accounts.

Dear John Podesta,
On behalf of the Organizing Committee, it is a great honor for me to welcome you to join BIT¡¯s 6th Low Carbon & Green Growth Earth Summit (LCGGES-2016) as a Speaker in GG108:Low Carbon Clean Technology of Forum GG1: Mitigation & Adaption, which will be held on June 30-July 3, 2016 in Korea International Exhibition & Conference Center (KINTEX), Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.

Keynote speakers were not as advertised

As any fule kno, this BIT Group is one of the longer-established players in the field. They started out on the fish-head circuit [H.S.Thompson 1973] in the 2000s, operating out of an office in a technology park in Dalian, organising meetings at second-tier venues and palming them off to credulous foreigners as Major Prestigious Events that fully warranted a $2000 registration. In the course of growth they acquired a reputation for shenanigans:

1. spamming people relentlessly;
2. packing out the venue with multiple simultaneous meetings;
3. stonewalling on the concept of "paying an invited speaker's travel expenses", while offering a bounty in the form of discounted attendance if you manage to recruit enough other suckers;
4. pioneering the passive-aggressive grift of wording an initial letter as if it were the third or fourth reminder, in the hope of instilling the recipient with a sense of guilt for ignoring the non-existent earlier communications;
5. adorning their promissory programs with the names of noted authorities in a field, neglecting the minor formality of notifying those individuals that they had been enlisted as Keynote Speakers or Meeting Co-Chairs;
6. being easily counter-pwned by bogus promises of a speech. For instance, from Dr Kurt Buttnase of the Center for Extraterrestrial Sciences, on "Effective eradication of the bit bug by massive response with mocked-up targets" [read the whole thing].
   

At some point BIT Life Sciences / BIT Congress people realised that simply charging for attendance (and handling accommodation) was leaving money on the table, as it left attendees (or their travel agencies) to book their airfares. They became BIT World Travel Group.

Travel arrangements not first-class as promised

Then BIT World Travel Inc in turn spawned Pioneer Century Science Conferences, which is where we started. Pai & Franco write of the two companies as if they compete:

...but in fact the same person, Ms Helen Zhao, runs both. The companies are two buttocks of a single bum [T. Sturge Moore 1911].

So far the mainstream media have ignored the shocking news of a Clinton advisor's links to the scamference industry, which is to say a direct link to Secretary Clinton herself, but it is only a matter of time.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

BONUS passive-aggressive grifting: Bio-Accent Open Journal (which is to say Ravishankar Kuppala of Hyderabad) tries the guilt-trip gambit for eliciting manuscripts. "If you don't give me your valuable paper and pay me for it, we won't be able to put the next issue of my skeevy little journal on-line!"

Hmm, difficult choice.


When they are not channeling pathos and pity-fucks through a publishing company named like a detergent additive, Ravi and Raju are directors of Isoy Info Technologies and Endos Info Technologies. I hope they are a little less annoying in those endeavours as the computer-software industry is not so receptive to sadness.

* The Facebukkake is littered with the pages of people proudly boasting that they received an invitation to be speaker at a Prestigious PCS Conference. Do they also boast about how their financial acumen has been recognised when they receive business-collaboration offers from a Nigerian Prince?