Conference housing pirates--the (criminal) market for hotel rooms

Here's a scam I hadn't encountered before.

I will be speaking at a transplant conference in February, and last week my phone rang and someone asked me if I had already made my hotel reservations, and offered to make them for me. I declined, and emailed the conference organizer asking if this was how housing was being arranged. In reply I got the following (slightly redacted) email, addressed to all the speakers....

"Dear ... Faculty,

I have received word from two speakers who advised me that they were contacted by a company called Expo Housing. (They can go by other names too) xxx told me she was contacted by a xxx who left an 866 call back number.

This company ...has NOT been contracted to organize, sell or arrange housing for anyone attending or speaking at the [conference] taking place in February 2016 ....

Please DO NOT BOOK housing with anyone. As a speaker you will receive a travel and housing survey from me or another member of the  staff located in the ... National Office. Please contact me immediately if you are contacted by anyone trying to book your housing. 

Our housing website is under construction at this time but again, as a speaker your housing will be arranged by  staff.

Housing pirates or hijackers are illegal entities who "sell" hotel rooms. These rooms can exist or not exist. Often times your money is lost. Typically these people target large meetings like the American Transplant Congress, but no meeting is safe. Any rooms booked through a pirate are not guaranteed by the group nor will they be included in the [conference] block of rooms. "

  

Cheating in China on (American) college admissions

Inside Higher Ed has the story: In China, No Choice But to Cheat?

July 9, 2015 By

Elizabeth Redden

"EUGENE, Ore. -- Is the admission process broken for Chinese applicants to American colleges?

Variations of that question came up again and again during sessions on Wednesday at the Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling [OACAC] conference. Persistent concerns about standardized test fraud, doctored transcripts and fake admission letters -- and the role of agents in helping to "pollute" the application process (as one session description put it) -- are causing some to worry that Chinese students might think cheating is their only choice.

"We need to make it [the application process] safe for honest applicants," said Terry Crawford, the chief executive officer and co-founder of InitialView, a video interviewing company based in Beijing.

"There's a perception in China that the system is rigged, that if you pay enough money you're going to get the results that you want," Crawford said. He cited a recent China Newsweek article laying out the process and prices for cheating on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) as just one example of the type of story that feeds into this perception (the reporter received test answers during the exam via a small, wireless-enabled watch)."

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Interestingly, Initial View, the company that Terry Crawford and Gloria Chyou founded in China, was initially founded to address the problem of fraud in English language tests, by offering applicants the opportunity to make a video of an unscripted interview that they conduct, to be sent to colleges, who can then confirm the fluency of the speaker, and later verify that the student who enrolls is the one who took the interview.