I had an odd experience a few weeks ago, related to the conference I just attended. The Australian organizers had volunteered to book my Boston-London flight. Then one afternoon I got a call from Charlotte, a travel agent who works in the U.S. branch of the organizers’ Australian travel agency. She thought the booking was probably fraudulent, and cited three reasons:

  1. The booking was issued in the name of one of the organizers, but I was listed as the traveler.
  2. The fare was unusually high.
  3. The email address, which concatenated the organizer’s name with the name of the travel agency, seemed odd to her.

She: “I’m pretty sure this is bogus.”

Me: “How would it be in someone’s interest to fraudulently book me a flight?”

She: “Who knows? It could be anything. When you’ve seen as much of this kind of thing as I have, you give up on trying to figure out people’s motives.”

Suddenly the whole thing felt wrong to me. I recalled how sparse the conference website had been when I’d last visited it the week before. The keynote speakers, including me, were listed, but everything else was placeholders. So I went back to the site and…nothing was there. Holy crap! Was it conceivable that the whole deal was some kind of malicious prank? That unlikely conclusion began to seem disturbingly likely when I googled around, found the organizer’s site and an affiliated academic site, and discovered that they were dead too.

Finally I found a page listing advisory board members, and called the person who lives closest to me, an academic in New Jersey. She verified that the company and conference were real. When I went back to recheck the websites they were up and running again, and the suspiciously sparse schedule was now fully populated.

My post-mortem analysis of this strange combination of circumstances raised a couple of interesting points:

Eyeballs on transactions.
After things got sorted out and the flight was booked, I had a long conversation with the travel agent. It seemed unusual that she had personally reviewed this transaction and, on her own initiative, flagged it as suspicious. Was that company policy, I asked? No, she said. The company mostly uses an automated system. It just happens that, in her remote branch office, Charlotte sees all the bookings, is motivated to review them, and brings substantial energy and intelligence to that task.

She told me she catches real fraud attempts every week or so. To the company at large, this is just spoilage. It gets written off as a cost of doing business. We assume that eyeballs on transactions are uneconomical. But is that really true? After this experience, and in view of my conversation with Paul English about the practicality of human-intensive customer service, I wonder if we should revisit that assumption.

Locality of trust.
This was an international conference, and the members of the advisory board live all around the world. The one I chose to contact, though, is the one who lives closest to me. Of course I’d be unlikely to call overseas first, because of long-distance tolls and time zones. But there were various folks in the U.S. I could have called, yet I picked the person who lives in New Jersey. Why? In retrospect I believe that’s because New Jersey is closer to my home than Illinois or California. Of course it’s completely irrational to trust a New Jerseyite more than a Californian for that reason. And yet, at a moment when nothing seemed certain, I acted out that irrational behavior. Trust shouldn’t diminish as the square of distance but, in our unconscious minds, I think it probably does. I’ll bet Jim Russell would agree.

All’s well that ends well. The conference organizers turned out to be really pleasant folks. (I’m downplaying their identities here, though you could triangulate them if you wanted to, because they’re naturally a bit embarrassed about what happened.) I enjoyed giving my talk, I met interesting people, I got to see Cambridge for the first time, it was a good trip. But for a couple of hours on that afternoon in December things were really weird!