Crappy science spam from Photon Journals
I've started receiving more and more science-related spam recently. Some of these are semi-legitimate, like those from the OMICS group, but should still be avoided (here's a good cautionary tale of what to expect if you go to an OMICS Group conference).
Sometimes I'm just disappointed by how little effort these spammers take to make their emails looks professional. Over the last couple of weeks I've received four emails from 'Photon Journals' asking me to submit my research to some of their (many) journals. To give you an idea of how lame their attempts at spamming people are, consider that:
- Their email comes from a Hotmail account.
- They address me as 'Dear Dr. Krbradnam' (clearly they have phished my academic email address from somewhere and just assumed that this is my surname).
- Their email is written in purple!
- Two emails on the same day ask me to submit material to two completely different journals (see below).
- The 'website' for the journal is hosted on Google Sites
- The website looks like it was designed by a five year old on acid (see below).
The modus operandi of these fake journals is just to charge you to submit your paper (and really it can be any paper, no-one is going to check it, let alone read it). I guess we should be grateful that some of these are so obviously fake, that it makes it easier to ignore them. Several sites are now collating list of all of these bogus journals (there are a lot).