"The Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) 2019 conference in Vancouver also reported similar shenanigans."
They saw right through that one.
A cheeky website is pretending to take attendee registrations and hotel bookings for folks heading to the upcoming Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Montreal, Canada, at the end of this year. Thousands of AI researchers and previous attendees received an email from the official NIPS team warning of the …
This is basically deception, so a formal complaint could get far more interesting results.
Maybe some management education with a lash will stop this sort of idiocy, nothing else seems to work. Ditto for the people who run those call centres that keep swapping called ID for every call they make.
"The real NIPS website is nips.cc. Please do not visit nips2018.org."
Gorillahand Facepalm!!
I would totally trust a website registered in the Cocos Islands, I would. (insert random Monty Python meme here).
But the real question is: does nips.cc deliver? Capitalism in action and all that.
It's like those "inoffical taxi services" that are being cracked down on by authorities .. cruelly delivering customers to the place they want to go.