Is there an actual, physical event associated with predatory conferences?

So far as I can tell, and have read online, predatory conferences typically are associated with an actual event.

To my mind, this seems to be a key difference between "predatory" and "fraudulent." If a conference takes your money and no event is organized, then there is clearly false advertising and grounds for legal action, perhaps even criminal charges. If a conference takes your money and organizes a horrible, worthless, CV-staining joke of an event, on the other hand, there is no regulatory body that you can complain to: scientific quality is considered to be a matter of judgement, and there is no way to easily distinguish between an honest-but-poor-quality conference and a intentionally predatory conference.

Yes, in these cases the event is organized but the quality is poor, since no one important in the field goes to that conference. An example from this website with scam conferences to be avoided.

From here:

"waset are a known predatory publisher, run by a former science teacher in Turkey (and his family). Readers have complained to this site about their fradulent behaviour, inclduing Kim Guan Saw, who wrote:

"I would also like to alert you that this particular organization has been using my name as their conference committee member. I am not involved at all with this organization and their conferences and have not consented for my name to be used. My university legal office has been informed and is looking into the matter. I hope you will inform your colleagues if they happen to associate me with these conferences."—2 April 2015

See the comments at the end of this post for other experiences; or this warning. Comments from the former include:

• "In 2012 I organised an international conference ... our list of working group titles has just been copied and pasted for a WASET conference (15–16 May 2013)"

• "The conference is a complete scam. I know I have been on several hiring committees and if we see someone list a paper published at WASET on their CV we immediately stop evaluating their application."

• "I went to a WASET conference and it was a complete joke. There were virtually no people there in my field, and the talks were completely unrelated to each other. Basically each person got up and spoke about their work to a completely unrelated audience. For example, the person before me talked about boat design, I talked about quantum mechanics, and the person after talked about Halal meat!"