Julia Hirschberg thought that she had reason to celebrate. In July, she had been elected to become a member of the European Academy of Engineering (EAE), an organization billed on its website as the “premier institution representing the highest professional distinction in engineering” with 35 Nobel laureates among its more than 400 elected members.

The accolade arrived just days after another unexpected honour: election to the Austrian Academy of Engineering. And in 2025, she had been elected to the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI).

Securing three prestigious international honours in such quick succession is a rare achievement. Hirschberg, a computer scientist at Columbia University in New York City, was thrilled. Congratulatory notes flooded in from colleagues after Columbia published a public announcement about her accomplishments. “I was really excited,” she says. “I’ve never had anything that quick happen ever.”

The good news continued. Within a couple of weeks, Michael Chu, who identified himself as the EAE’s secretariat, told Hirschberg that the organization was electing a rotating chairperson, and he wanted to nominate her for the position, for which she’d be compensated US$2,000 per year.

And that’s when things started to get weird. When Hirschberg checked the EAE’s website, her name was already prominently displayed atop the leadership masthead. But she had never agreed to take the post; she also had never been asked for references, nor had she attended a single meeting. In truth, she hadn’t even heard of any of these organizations. (In a written response to Nature, Chu said that he had “inferred a preliminary consent” on the basis of correspondence with Hirschberg. In this correspondence, which Nature reviewed, Hirschberg replied to Chu’s invitation by inquiring about the responsibilities of the job, but never said that she accepted the position.)

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science

She is not alone. After several researchers flagged concerns about these academic societies, Nature began investigating. The reporting revealed that Chu is connected to all three organizations and that much of the information about them online seems to be fabricated.

These entities belong to a sprawling international constellation of suspicious academies and societies that have successfully misled some of the world’s leading scientists and universities, including Stanford University in California and the US National Academies of Sciences (NAS) in Washington DC. The deceptive organizations’ websites often contain content that has been plagiarized or manipulated, falsehoods about their institutional histories and locations and honorifics available for purchase.

The goal for these kinds of organization, says Fan Xiudi, an educational-policy specialist at Tongji University in Shanghai, China, seems to be to build a facade of legitimacy, and then use that to sell memberships and awards to early-career researchers, particularly in China.

Nature identified dozens of researchers in China and Pakistan who list fellowships and awards from the EAE, NAAI and affiliated societies on their CVs and social-media profiles. The NAAI charges dues of up to $600 for membership on its website. And posts advertising consultancy services on Chinese social-media networks offer to broker applications to these academies, presumably for a fee, although it is unclear whether these third-party services are affiliated with the academies themselves. It is also unclear how many scholars have paid for these honours, or whether those who hold them were actively deceived about the nature of the societies.

“China’s current research evaluation system relies heavily on various honorary titles,” says Fan, who studies academic rigour in China. This, say Fan and others, potentially creates a lucrative market for fraudulent societies.

Chu’s responses to the allegations made in this article defend the integrity of the organizations and describe his role in their operations as limited and non-overlapping. He says that the organizations disavow third-party consultancy agencies claiming to sell titles.

Down the rabbit hole

Henry Dyson reckons that he has heard of just about every award, prize, fellowship and prestigious society that researchers are eligible for. As director of faculty honorifics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, it’s his job to secure recognition for the university’s staff members — and to protect them from bad actors.

Like Hirschberg, Dyson also first learnt of the EAE in July. A faculty member had forwarded him an unsolicited invitation to join, and the researcher wanted to know if the accolade was legitimate. Dyson found a polished website for the EAE and hundreds of news announcements about its activities. Members, it says, include prominent individuals such as the President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum and Nobel laureates Frances Arnold and Carol Greider. Dyson also found another version of the website, which indicated that seven Nobel laureates, all now deceased, helped to establish the organization in 1992. (This information has since been removed.)

But Dyson was perplexed that an organization of such stature had no Wikipedia page. Mention of it was absent from the biographies of its famous founding members. More members listed on EAE’s directory hail from North America than from Europe. And when Dyson contacted two other University of Michigan scientists who were listed as rotating section chairpeople of the EAE, both said they had never heard of the academy, let alone agreed to these positions. (Chu told Nature that the listing resulted from “an unauthorized or unverified upload” by administrative personnel during website maintenance.)

Dyson had seen enough to warn his colleagues to steer clear, and he e-mailed his preliminary findings to Nature’s news team. “I would love to know,” he explained, “am I just in a rabbit hole on this thing?”

In an investigation into dozens of academic societies with similar features, Nature found numerous instances in which high-profile scientists were listed as members and leaders without their knowledge or consent. Many of the societies use names and acronyms that resemble established organizations, and some have plagiarized text from them. The websites of these societies include false details about the organizations’ partnerships and unverifiable details about their origins and their locations. They are often registered at postal addresses that mask where they are truly operating from, and they have used digitally altered and misleading photos.

Nature found more than 30 press releases published by leading universities, including Columbia, celebrating their faculty members’ achievements at two of these organizations, the EAE and the NAAI. The pattern of digital deception for these two is extensive. For example, websites for both claim that they collaborate with academies such as the NAS, the Royal Academy of Engineering in London and the American Meteorological Society in Boston, Massachusetts. Five of the listed organizations responded to Nature’s requests for confirmation and said that they had no knowledge of these alleged partnerships. (Two others have not yet replied.)

Information about the physical whereabouts of these societies are opaque and misleading. Nature found no entities matching the EAE’s name in Sweden’s public database of organizations. The EAE’s address on its website points to a virtual mailbox, a service that provides businesses with a registered address without needing to lease a physical space.

The EAE’s website also provides a pinned location in Sweden on Google Maps that displays an image of a stately academic building with large block letters on its facade that say European Academy of Engineering in Swedish. Comparison with other existing photos reveals that it is actually a doctored image of the main building of the nearby University of Gothenburg, and Nature has found other manipulated images on archived versions of the EAE website. Chu says that he was “completely unaware” of such doctored images, characterizing them as “legacy web assets”.

Parts of the EAE website have been plagiarized, too. An archived version of the site showed that a post highlighting the organization’s support for Ukraine one year after Russia’s invasion in 2022 was copied directly from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s website.

In search of Michael Chu

There is little publicly available detail about how these institutions select their members or their leadership.

Several people seem to be involved in their operation, but the name that appears most frequently in connection with them is Michael Chu, and his Chinese name, Chaoyang Zhu.

His profile on the NAAI website, on which Chu is listed as the secretariat, includes a long list in Mandarin of institutional affiliations, awards and books he has authored. It lists appointments across an eclectic array of institutions, including professor at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) in London and an elected member of academic bodies spanning Europe and Asia.

Nature contacted the UIUC and the RSA, and neither could find anyone matching his names in their records. (Chu maintains that he holds an RSA fellowship.) In various manuscripts, Chu listed his research affiliation as the International Institute of Engineering Psychology (IIEP) in Denver, Colorado.

Public records show that both the IIEP and the NAAI use the same virtual mailbox address in Colorado. These records also reveal that Chu registered another organization, the US National Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, at the same address. It, along with the IIEP, has been marked as ‘delinquent’ by the state of Colorado for failing to provide an annual report to the state.

Several researchers who were contacted by Nature have seen Chu on video calls. Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas, attended the NAAI’s 2026 annual meeting in Singapore virtually, expecting an international summit. Instead, he found an intimate gathering, conducted mainly in Chinese, of about two dozen researchers that had been organized by Chu and an assistant.

A reverse image search of Chu’s face revealed that he was connected to yet another organization, the International Institute of Film Science & Arts, which claims to be the “world’s foremost learned society” in the “cinematic arts”, with more than 800 members in 48 countries. Chu confirmed to Nature that he helped to establish the organization.

With Chu’s name appearing across academies in such disparate subjects, it raises the question of how members are selected, says Tsu-Jae Liu, president of the US National Academy of Engineering in Washington DC. “I would want to make sure that the societies’ leaders are actually respected members of the profession.”

In his response to Nature, Chu said that he holds direct operational responsibility solely for the IIEP and that he resigned from an administrative role at the NAAI in May 2026. He said his involvement with the EAE began in June 2026 as “temporary administrative and advisory support”, and that he has not been an administrator for NASAH. Nature found that Chu continued to send official NAAI communications after his claimed resignation date, and that he holds the title of secretary general at the EAE — a role inconsistent with the temporary advisory capacity he described.

Credentials for a fee

Nature found dozens of other academic societies that seem to be linked to those associated with Chu. These often operate as a circular credentialing network, citing or republishing one another’s announcements, promoting shared events and funnelling researchers from one society to another. Scholars who accepted an invitation from one society were often elected to its sister academies weeks later, Nature found.

The societies seem to use the names and reputations of prominent scientists, such as Hirschberg, to project legitimacy. They bestow unsolicited, fee-free honours on these researchers, while offering others paid membership and other academic credentials for a fee.

Nature has not identified anyone who has admitted paying for such titles, but according to the NAAI’s website, for instance, fees range from $30 annually for a ‘student affiliate’ position to a $600 initiation fee to become a full member. The site also advertises a virtual PhD programme for $10,000 and a virtual postdoc programme for $2,000. In exchange, members receive a suite of digital deliverables, including a “verifiable digital membership card” and an official certificate designed to be shared on platforms such as LinkedIn.

These fees are the reason that, in July 2026, Michael Jordan, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, asked the NAAI to remove him as a member after initially agreeing to be part of the society and recording a statement for a conference in 2025. “Paying for titles is anathema to me — that’s not what a professional society should be about,” Jordan says.

The NAAI did not remove him as a member. Instead, without his knowledge, it listed him as a featured speaker at a conference that the organization is hosting in October, which is charging an attendance fee of up to $600. Jordan discovered he was listed after Nature contacted him to enquire about his participation, and he has since successfully petitioned the NAAI to remove his name from the website.

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