Academic scam- what will happen, and what should I do?

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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 08 Jul 2018 Posts: 1

This is not your usual 419 scam. I've been baiting a so called academic journal. The initial modus operandi is as follows. These guys email academics telling us what wonderful people we are, and would we like to be editorial board members. If we reply, they give us a silly form which we fill up. So, I created a fake account and signed up as an editorial board member.

Here's the fake journal
<snipped - bware419ers>

Here's my fake bio
<snipped - bware419ers>

Since they've invited me onboard, I haven't heard a peep for them. Does anyone know how this scam progresses? Or am I just supposed to be a third party in a scam where someone else falls victim?

That isn't a photo I ripped off a real human. I took it from a site that generates fake profile photos.

For those of you who don't understand, in academia, being invited onto a real journal's editorial board is a very prestigious thing. No one in their right mind would invite Dick Inueue.

Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2018 4:54 am

I've seen things like this before. Although not exactly the same thing, I recall one person who submitted an article to a fraudulent journal consisting entirely of the phrase "GET ME OFF YOUR F**KING MAILING LIST". It was accepted because he paid a fee to get his article published or to join the journal, which is the point of these scams. At some point you'll be asked for a membership fee or something like that. The alternative is that as you suggested, they'll use your profile/articles to convince other people to pay some sort of fees.

However, this isn't the sort of thing that we deal with here; we typically deal with standard 419 scams/advance fee fraud. A mod will probably lock this thread as it does not pertain to what we do here. I'm not sure exactly what I'd do in your position, and I'm guessing someone else knows more than I do. Maybe report the fake site and get it shut down if you know for certain that it's fraudulent; a mod would be able to help with that too.

Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2018 9:51 pm

The site is dead.

Before a mod (rightfully) locks this I would like to throw in that I encountered a similar scam a few years ago. Because of my membership in some professional organization or another, I received some mail that invited me to submit my bio information for a sketchy version of Who's Who. All I needed to do was submit a fee, which was presented as a sliding scale depending on the level of detail I wanted published about myself. BTW, some of the editions are really published, though they have dubious value. See https://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-weiner/are-you-in-whos-who_b_502388.html

Baiting Guru Joined: 10 Oct 2010 Posts: 3877

^^^^

well, that sounds like a sitekiller here took the opportunity to get a site killed.

Very Happy

Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2018 11:27 pm

Moved here. As the OP almost stated: This is not <strike>your usual</strike> a 419 scam. Since there was no evidence of a scam, the site info was removed, per our guidelines.

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