EMBL wishes to warn invited speakers for conferences and courses about the common fraudulent schemes requesting payment from invited speakers for hotel accommodation during their stay. These often claim to be an agency providing housing services on behalf of EMBL or even pretend to be EMBO or EMBL. Taking event details and logos from the websites to make the approach convincing, scammers contact speakers by email or telephone, saying that they require payment (eg. via PayPal) or credit card details for hotels for their stay. Variations include asking speakers to pay for registration fees. 

EMBL never requires its invited speakers to pay for hotels, registration or any other costs and will never ask invited speakers for credit card details. EMBL makes and pays for its own hotel bookings for all invited speakers. If you are coming to EMBL as an invited speaker, EMBL will have made the necessary hotel arrangements for you and you will be notified accordingly by the same organiser here at EMBL who is already in contact with you for all other matters related to the event.

Although EMBL does not share the contact details of invited speakers with any housing services, fraudsters take advantage of the easy access to scientists’ email addresses online, coupled with speaker line-ups on conference websites. EMBL does not have agreements with any housing services, and does not authorise anyone to contact speakers on our behalf. For more information about the recipients of your data please see our Information for data subjects.

EMBL strongly urges all invited speakers to ignore all contact from any ‘accommodation services’ and not to share any details about their bank account. Any such request should be ignored. Suspicious communications purportedly from, for or on behalf of EMBL can be reported to EMBL at the following email address events@embl.de.

If you are coming as a participant or exhibitor to conferences and courses organised by EMBL, you are advised not to book accommodation from any ‘agencies’ contacting you and to use a service provider that you know and trust. EMBL provides a list of trusted hotels on the individual event website and we encourage you to contact those hotels directly.

We look forward to welcoming you in Heidelberg.

Your EMBL Events team