As a creative, I’m pretty sure I don’t just speak for myself when I say that I like awards, and being awarded - and when it’s an individual thing, all’s the better. So you can imagine my (initial) delight when I received the following email, notifying me that I’d been awarded the “BRAND LEADERSHIP AWARD” by the World Brand Congress in recognition of my “professional efforts.” Now I’d never heard of the World Brand Congress before, but surely that didn’t matter - my fame must be spread pretty far and wide by now - even to Mumbai by the looks of things. 
Legitimate recognition or world class scam? I’m erring on the latter, but I’ve been researching the event and they’ve certainly gone to great lengths to make it appear legit. In fact, let me take you back to the beginning of the story. This all started with a web enquiry that came through our company website and was forwarded on to me.
There was just enough info to pique interest, but the email address threw me. Whenever there’s a person’s name and the email address has no connection to it, I usually think spam. But I’d just spoken at the ADMA forum, I thought someone might have seen my presentation and mentioned it to another event organiser - I was up for an all expenses paid trip to India as an entree to the international speaking circuit. So I emailed him back. This was the response:
So there was certainly something about his unique turn of phrase (“forward your coordinates”???) that started to raise a few eyebrows. Then there was the Global Chairman, Dave Porter. Don’t these scams from odd parts of the world always have an wholly Anglo sounding protagonist on the other side of them?
Anyway so Dave did email me and you saw what I received above. Apart from this whole thing being somewhat out of the blue, it’s the little details that caught my attention - the odd salutation (“Compliments for the Season and Greetings!” no english speaker would start anything with a phrase like that); the gaps in word spacing in the sentence that’s telling me why I’ve been selected (“This is in recognition of your professional efforts.”). All makes it feel a tad suspicious to me.
The event site - http://www.worldbrandcongress.com/ - looks much like these conference sites always look, but then there’s Aalok Pandit, the guy who made the initial enquiries. Here he is on Linkedin - http://in.linkedin.com/in/aalokpandit - and here’s his “company” website - http://www.funandjoyatwork.com/ - plot gets a little thicker. Things then get a little hazy when it comes “Global Chairman, David Porter” - very little on him online.
What do you think? Am I being paranoid? It seems to be a real event, but is my airline ticket, event registration and hotel booking in the mail. Unlikely. Perhaps it’s just a clever way of attracting delegates - they may well be giving an award to everyone who turns up, just for turning up?
