Event agencies and trade show participants beware: money laundering and phising schemes are on the rise. Photo Credit: iStock/SPmemory
An event inquiry comes in via WhatsApp, often from a number registered in China or Hong Kong, with what appears to be a legitimate event request. They want to engage your services for a meeting in Singapore with a venue, AV and the works. The proposal gets signed off unusually fast, with no questions asked and no pushback on costs.
This is just one type of scam increasingly targeting the events industry, according to Atika Rosli, managing director at Beyond Events.
The word ‘scam’, she believes, often undersells how sophisticated these approaches have become. They might look like a straightforward sales email or event inquiry, but the intent is either data phishing or something more financially sinister.
Know the signs
“Then there’s a payment conversation and suddenly they'd prefer to wire funds to a Hong Kong account rather than your business bank,” she says. “That's a classic money-laundering pattern, and it's the point where you need to walk away entirely.”
She advises to always ask for verifiable credentials: this could be a company website, a corporate email domain or a LinkedIn profile that has actual history.
“If they can't provide these quickly and cleanly, don't invest more of your time,” she says. “Trust your instincts too – an unusually eager client who never negotiates and is suspiciously flexible on everything except the bank account details? That's your gut telling you something.”
Besides the money laundering schemes, are also AI-generated RFPs designed entirely to fish for proprietary pricing structures and agency credentials during the bidding cycle, said Mervyn Tan, chief technology officer at Aavii Worldwide and country director – Malaysia at BCD Meetings & Events.
Participants are at risk too
It is not just event agencies that are being targeted – participants are being duped by illegitimate websites and companies.
Besides cloned websites, ‘housing pirates’ are also becoming more convincing with the help of AI-generated branding. Housing pirates are companies that reach out to attendees and exhibitors, claiming to offer good deals on hotel rooms, and fraudulent room-block offers.
How can event companies educate paticipants? Catherine Chaulet, president and CEO at Global DMC says that urgency is the most reliable warning sign of a scam; almost every scam pressures you to act fast, pay now or bypass your normal process, so any message that rushes a financial decision deserves a pause.
“Watch for payment details that change at the last minute, requests routed through unfamiliar email domains and communications that skip your established approvals,” she says.
Verification through a second channel is the single most effective defense. As Chaulet points out, if a ‘CEO’ emails approving a wire transfer, confirm it by phone using a number from your own records. Beyond that, set payment protocols firm enough that no urgent request can override them, and point attendees to one official registration URL that you repeat across every touchpoint so a fake site has nowhere to gain a foothold.
Wire transfers on the show floor
Even past the virtual registration stage and onto the physical showfloor, attendees continue to be at risk, with scammers capitalising on the fast pace of trade exhibition floors to catch deal-eager attendees off guard.
Besides QR code phishing, more sophisticated social engineering where AI voice clones convincingly mimic C-suite executives to pressure on-site project leads into making emergency, out-of-band wire transfers during peak times of stress, according to Aavii Worldwide’s Tan.
What can event profs do?
While keeping pace with the sheer speed of new, AI-driven scams is challenging, Tan says event professionals can change how they condition teams to approach such scams.
“There is no one-size-fits-all technical remedy here,” he says. “Instead of relying on narrow, targeted procedures and checklists, our approach must be behavioural. The single most effective defence is cultivating a healthy amount of scepticism across the organisation.”
According to Tan, this involves training teams to be less trusting by default, to remain intensely vigilant, and to instinctively raise red flags the moment a request or timeline feels slightly off.