Tradeshow Scams: the Next Step

Over the last month, Tradeshow Week published a series of stories by Senior Assistant Editor Rachel Wimberly on scams that, in one way or another, involved the tradeshow industry. In almost every situation she wrote about, somebody was selling space for a nonexistent show

As it's turned out, the series could possibly have gone on indefinitely, because it brought more and more examples to light — too many to write about. Most cases were small-time operations involving one or two people operating far from the limelight, all the better, I suppose, to escape detection.

There are a few reasons why all of this is so disturbing.

The first is that, as we learned, there appears to be little recourse and few consequences for selling exhibit space at an exhibition that doesn't really exist. In one case we reported on, local police officials that were interested hardly even had a way to track down the perpetrators, because there was little more than a mailbox and cell phone number connecting anybody to the operation.

The FBI told TSW that, because the incidents often involved interstate commerce, they would fall under its aegis. However, the federal agency would also have to be convinced that the accumulated damages were at least half a million dollars, a number that would be difficult to document, particularly if nobody (outside, perhaps, a TSW editor) was willing to go to the trouble of locating the victims of a scam.

What's more, it's not always that easy for somebody outside the tradeshow business to tell the difference between a scam and a poorly executed transaction. After all, everybody knows of a flat-out bad tradeshow operator. It isn't a crime to rent an exhibit hall, sign up exhibitors and then fail to adequately market the event. Exhibitors can be disappointed that the show manager didn't do enough to draw a crowd, but they can't have him or her arrested for being a failure as a business person.

Also, because there is no law enforcement agency or industry watchdog keeping track of these kinds of scams specifically, it's difficult to know just how common they are. The perpetrators seem to do a pretty good job of staying far from the legitimate industry, recruiting salespeople who have little or no background in exhibitions and selling space to organizations for whom shows are a new experience as well. Even when these salespeople and exhibitors realize they've been taken, they may not be aware of who to register a complaint with — because even if there is an outlet, it's little-known and ineffectual (as a side note: the state attorney general's office may take the complaint, but won't say whether or not it's pursuing it).

Last, and perhaps most important, whenever a legitimate business person is taken advantage of in this way, he or she is likely to never again consider going to, let alone exhibiting in, a tradeshow. For that person, the entire exhibition industry is cast in a negative light.

We have written here before about the incremental damage done to the tradeshow industry by the vagaries of modern travel. We have pointed out that every time someone decides — because of the hassles of a long line for airport security, a surly desk clerk at a hotel or an overpriced bottle of water at a convention center — that an out-of-town trip to a show is just not worth it, the industry suffers another loss.

It is the same here. In our research, TSW found that many victims of these swindles were as embarrassed as they were abused, and reluctant to tell too many people about their misfortune. They may just chalk it up to experience, and decide never to visit another showfloor again.

So, what is to be done? There is little a magazine like TSW can do besides record the accounts of other people — and call on industry leaders to use whatever influence they have with law enforcement agencies to take this situation more seriously, or at the very least act on it in some manner.