Comment by sunshine-o
18 days ago
I once registered as an "expert" on those EU related websites in the hope to be invited to an event where I could network.
Next thing I know one of those Horizon 2020 project send me 20 proposals to evaluate and select by next week. Each of them was 50-100 pages long, mostly BS.
I couldn't really do any real due diligence and I don't believe anybody did any on me. So just create register fake domain names to get a fake corporate email addresses, create a fake LinkedIn profiles and you can have a significant weight in the selection process for grants. It is that simple.
I remember it made me feel sick in my stomach to think that the money that would be given through my evaluation was most likely equivalent to one year of tax revenue from a random honest small business.
Where did you register yourself as an expert? Asking for a friend.
Oh man hard to remember. I can just tell you it was not on the official EU website. It was on a thematic one that probably doesn't exist anymore, something like "The coalition for the development of X in Europe".
What I also discovered is often let's say the EU wants to give 10M to 10 projects in a particular domain. Then a there are companies specialised in applying as a project and saying: our project is actually to subdivide this 1M into 8 times 100K and we keep 200K as a fee (I am simplifying but that was the idea).