Ariel Karlinsky was confused. A Ph.D. student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he had just received a message stating the paper he had submitted to an economics conference in Moldova had been accepted. But Karlinsky hadn’t submitted his work to the conference. In fact, he had never even heard about the event.

At first, Karlinsky assumed a predatory conference had signed him up without his knowledge. But he recognized the name of one of the organizers, the National Institute for Economic Research, which he knew to be legitimate. Someone, it turned out, was impersonating Karlinsky. On August 11, 2025 that someone had submitted one of the researcher’s papers to the conference under Karlinsky’s name from an email address that looked like it could be his. Only because the conference organizers replied to the university email address listed in his paper, instead of the one used for the submission, did the real Karlinsky learn of the scam.

While university email addresses are the go-to means for identity verification, a recent analysis has revealed that fraudsters have found ways to breach this safeguard as well, identifying 94 fake profiles from a pool of thousands set up for AI conferences in 2024 and 2025.

Source https://retractionwatch.com/2025/10/23/confusing-and-frankly-disturbing-when-researchers-are-impersonated/

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