Watch out for fake travel emails (it’s scam, phishing)

Dear community, this is an important heads up, please take a moment to read.

A few of our Keynote Speakers received fake / scam / phishing e-mails related to their travel to Wrocław. This is a surprisingly elaborate scam which likely leverages AI in its automation and it is our intention to help you avoid it. Here is the e-mail:

For your upcoming visit to Wrocław in August.

Kindly provide your arrival and departure dates for us to finalize your reservation.

Once confirmed we will email you an invoice and an itinerary including detailed information about your booking

Fake spam / phishing e-mail from “Global Travel Experts” (events@gtravelexpert.com).

As of writing this, the VPO Organizing Committee has not initiated any travel arrangements for our Attendees, and although the above message does not claim to be affiliated with VPO, it does demonstrate “shady” practices:

• Scraping our website for names of people who will attend,
• correlating these names with e-mail addresses found elsewhere,
• taking into account the dates and the place of our conference,
• sending out e-mails pretending to help with travel arrangements.

We are unsure of the consequences of answering these e-mails. This may be phishing (wanting to extort information such as a bank account) or scam (wanting to steal your deposit) or an actual travel agency (with a shady way to obtain customers). In either case this seems to be a novel use of AI (or a very bored human) in scam automation and we should watch out for it.

Please keep in mind that the VPO Organizers will only contact you via official channels such as our e-mail address in the vpoptics.info domain.

Thank you very much to the Speakers for bringing this to our attention!