[lisper]

I can tell you from personal experience that organizing a "fake" conference is beyond trivial. All you need is a topic that is narrow enough that all of the attendees know and like each other. I was an attendee at several such conferences back when I made my living publishing papers, and I was astonished at how easy it was to publish bullshit as long as it was the right venue, and how borderline impossible it was to publish anything that I considered to have actual value. (In my career I published dozens of conference papers, but only one journal paper and one book chapter.)

In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.