A Highly Suspicious Conference

I suspect strongly that the International Advanced Technologies Symposium is a scam conference. Here's why.

I received an email from F.Ü. - 8th INTERNATIONAL ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES SYMPOSIUM(IATS 2017) (iats17@kurumsal.firat.edu.tr) recently. The original, unrendered email with all the headers intact is available here, and a rendered version is available here.

Consider this screenshot:

And here's a screenshot of the topics list:

Here's an image from the bottom of the message:

Now, here's the mistakes:

1. You don't list a bazillion recipients whose names all start with the same letter. You hide that information, or you create a mailing list with a meaningful name.
2. You name the person you're addressing - not Sir/Madam, not Colleague, but an actual name.
3. You don't provide conflicting information. In this case, they begin by claiming to be interested in "all aspects of the topics related to the conference" (I'll get to those shortly); but in the next paragraph, they as for papers specifically about "social science and/or education researches."
4. You don't invite people who are completely disconnected from ALL the conference topics you list (as they invited me).
5. You don't skip the spell checker. "Researches" is not a word.
6. You don't make sycophantic claims about the expertise of the generic "colleagues" that you're inviting.
7. You don't make conferences that cover every frickin' field in the world, while at the same time also writing that you're after specific topics (see point #3).
8. After having announced you're interested in everything, you don't limit the number of journals to which papers from the conference might be reprinted to those in very specific areas.
9. You don't tease about the potential for the highly-prized journal publication without also indicating how the special papers will be selected. This point along pretty much screams It's A Trap!! 

Finally, you don't forget to add - somewhere - a mechanism to unsubscribe from future mailings.

When I put all these things together, I can't help but come to the conclusion that this conference is some kind of scam.