Conference Record

Hijacked and Cloned

The hardest case is not an obviously fake conference. It is a real one, copied. For teams comparing day-to-day work practices, further details provides further context.

A cloned event takes the name, the history and sometimes the committee of a legitimate conference, puts them on a different domain, and collects the registrations. Every checkable claim on the page is true about somebody — just not about the entity taking your money. An additional independent source is Zenodo .

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

How it works

The name is copied, exactly or nearly.

The domain differs, typically by top-level domain — a .org or .net variant of an established .com, or a hyphenated version, or a year appended.

The history is copied. Previous editions, photographs, testimonials, sometimes the entire archive, because it is all public.

The committee is copied. Real names of real academics, listed without their knowledge — which is why "the committee contains findable people" is not sufficient on its own.

And search does the rest. Reports describe aggressive optimisation on the cloned site, which frequently outranks the original — a legitimate association running one conference a year has no reason to invest in search, and the clone's entire business depends on it.

Why the standard checks partly fail

Item two passes. The committee members exist and their institutional pages are real.

Item four can pass. Senior colleagues recognise the conference name, because the name is the real one.

Item three can pass, if the clone rides on the original's listings.

What fails is the connection between the name and the entity in front of you — and none of the seven items asks about that directly.

The five checks for this specific case

One. Reach the conference from the association's own site, not from search or from the invitation. If the association's events page does not link to the address you are on, stop.

Two. Check the domain against previous editions. A conference in its 20th year has a pattern — a stable domain, or per-edition domains under a recognisable scheme. A sudden change is worth explaining.

Three. Look at where the money goes. Bank details in a different country from the organiser, a personal-looking payee, or a payment processor rather than an institution.

Four. Ask one committee member. An email to a named academic asking whether they are on the committee takes a minute and settles it completely. They will want to know if they are being listed without consent.

Five. Check contact details against the institution. A conference hosted by a university uses university addresses. A free email service in the contact block on an otherwise institutional page is the mismatch worth noticing.

The tools that help

Search the conference name with the current year and see which domains appear. Two competing addresses for the same event is the signal.

Check whether a hijacked-identity register lists it. Registers maintained for cloned journals also track conference identity theft, and they are free.

And search the organiser name together with "predatory" — the fifteen-second check that surfaces community warnings the clone cannot suppress.

If you find one

Tell the real organiser. They frequently do not know, and they are the only party who can act.

Tell the listed committee members, if they are being used without consent.

And do not engage with the clone to find out more. Correspondence confirms a live address and produces more invitations.

The version that is not a clone

Being careful, because domain changes happen legitimately.

Conferences move. A per-edition domain is normal in some communities, a rebrand happens, an association changes its web address.

The distinguishing test is whether the permanent body confirms it. A legitimate move is announced by the association on its own site. A clone cannot produce that confirmation, and it is the one thing it cannot copy.

The short version