Comment by vanderZwan

I can't speak for this conference, but fake conference scams do exist.

I have a friend who fell for one. He won the Dutch "Student of the Year" award in... I think 2006. When our then-minister of education proposed to make maths more popular in high school by dumbing down the curriculum, he organized a giant STEM activity day on a nation-wide scale to popularize it. We were both physics student at the time.

Anyway, as part of the award he was allowed to pick a conference to go to. He chose one in Spain. When he arrived it turned out he had fallen for an internet scam: the conference only existed as a scam website and the money had disappeared. He still had a nice weekend with his best buddy (now husband) though, and at least it didn't cost him anything.