[NHCOLL-L:4398] Re: inquiry from Nepal

[Doug Yanega]

>If anyone has been contacted by Govinda Bhandari, director of 
>Research and Conservation of Nature Nepal (RECON), regarding an 
>invitation to visit to your institution, I'd appreciate it if you 
>would contact me off-list.

There's a rash of things like this going around, and a few are from 
legitimate researchers, even if many are not. This is worth 
discussing on-list.

For one example I encountered recently, Narender Sharma of the 
Zoological Survey of India appears to be entirely legitimate.

On the other hand, Rajkumar Chauhan of the "Zoological & Botanical 
Garden of  Kathmandu, Nepal" is a fake, and it has been suggested 
that this is an outfit trying to get people illegally into the US 
(they use the letter of invitation to get a Visa, and then sell that 
to a third party).

Other vaguely-similar cases in the past reported here on NHCOLL 
appear to be fronts for biological supply companies, but this is a 
different sort of scam; and it's based on the real-life practices of 
institutions in and around India, soliciting letters of invitation to 
work abroad.

One cannot safely assume either that they are all real, OR that they 
are all fakes. You need to investigate carefully on a case-by-case 
basis. There is no reason to offend legitimate researchers in the 
process of weeding out the frauds.

To wit: Govinda Bhandari is the name of a PhD student at Kathmandu 
University in 2008. I find no records, however, relating to any 
entity known as "Nature Nepal". Unless it is a brand-spanking new 
NGO, this one is suspicious. It's not impossible for a PhD student to 
occupy a directorship right after graduation, but it's also not 
impossible for someone to just grab your name off the web and use it 
as a legitimate-sounding but hard-to-trace pseudonym.

Sincerely,
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82