The story of how Dylan Fazel drifted into academic-publishing scams and from there into conference fraud would make for a fascinating interview, if any journalist or documentary film-maker in Minnesota is at a loose end. It is unclear whether the emphasis on biomedical fields in his operation is motivated by a thwarted childhood medic-manqué ambition, or simply that that's where the money is...
I am sorry. I seem to have committed the classic dramaturgical blunder of starting the story at the beginning, rather than in media res as tradition demands. Let me start again.
It only takes a few minutes with the Goofle Sir Chengine to paper the screen with tweets from people wondering how to get off the A. Siozos (M.D.) mailing list, or wondering whether invitations to his prestigious congresses are legit. **** SPOILER ALERT **** no they're not.
That "A. Siozos MD" predatory conference/journal spammer is really persistent.— Diary of a frustrated academic 💻 🇳🇱 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 (@dutchscientist) February 13, 2019
Jus got an email from siozos@m.aoamconferences.com. Predatory or not?— Laurent Seroude (@seroude) March 7, 2020
This must be one of the most elaborate predatory conference scams. They won't let go!— Maarten van Smeden (@MaartenvSmeden) March 30, 2019
The emails are signed by A. Siozos, M.D. who (supposedly) is EIC at Archives of Applied Medicine (a predatory journal)
Anybody else with experiences with this scam? pic.twitter.com/dJeIZrNceu
More #predatorypublishing nonsense. Not less than 3 email filters for variations of domain and yet still gets through because they change their domain every day. Why would a legitimate publisher need to do this? A. Siozos MD and P. Jimenez PhD shove off! @BenMazer pic.twitter.com/elIeZtMBTs— Sean R Williamson (@Williamson_SR) March 6, 2019
NO WAIT, you can't, because ResearchGate zorched 200 contributions after receiving a legal-thuggery nastygram, and saw no benefit to themselves in replying to the bumptious censorious asshat with a richly-deserved invitation to "sniff my taint" [Popehat].
Bruno Chrcanovic added a reply
This serves as a reminder that academic social-networking sites like ResearchGate and Academia.com do not exist for your benefit, and any services they provide will evaporate faster than a Trump promise in the event of anything interfering with their monetising of your work.
As of now a replacement discussion thread exists, not yet cancelled by complaints from the botmaster behind the fake 'Siozos' identity that his commercial freedom to defraud people is constrained by attempts to warn them. Not to forget the equally fake identities "P. Jimenez, Ph.D." and "L. Smith M.D.", for the grifter has creativity to burn in the naming of spambots. In that thread we learn (inter alia) that the keynote speakers listed in the brochure had no intention of attending the Annual Genetics Conference and had no idea of the honour bestowed upon them... which is to say, the entire Prospectus was an unabashed fraud.
Two other aspects of that brochure are of interest (for sufficiently broad values of 'interest'). First, the promise of a special issue of AoAM containing the Conference Proceedings.
In fact the AoAM archives are a ghost-town where nothing but tumbleweed has moved since June 2019 and the only sounds are crickets and the mournful howls of far-off coyotes; the journal is moribund, as the aggressiveness of its spamming is not matched in the actual management of a criminal enterprise.
The second aspect was the name 'KEI' as part of the machinery of shearing:
Physical cheques and letters to IMR are for historical reasons (TRADITION) funneled through a different mail-drop at 712 H St NE Washington DC 20002, with a cheque-cashing service conveniently located upstairs.
Alternative salubrious abode
Despite these cut-outs, KEI is a departure from the norm in parasitical publishing, being an entirely US operation with no Hyderabad involvement. In fact the man behind KEI's campaign of global spam harassment documented himself thoroughly in his company ownership, and in Wikipedia revision logs, and in a blog dating back to the founding of Medical Research Archives where he claimed the title of "Interim Editor-in-Chief"; and in the registration of domains; and even by signing spam and correspondence with clients (before discovering the pleasures of spurious personae), as Dylan Fazel of Anoka, Minnesota.
Now pressure-to-publish-exploiting spam has evolved towards ever more aggravating persistence, stalking potential victims and boiling their bunnies, and it is only a matter of time before your mailbox deafens you with Feckle-Freezer-related screaming.
Dylan was a pioneer in this evolution, bombarding his targets with follow-ups and reminders... often skipping the original invitation and moving straight on to the reminders, in the hope of instilling the recipients with a sense of guilt and indebtedness. His special innovation, though, was an "ingratiating back-story" literary genre, in which the pressure to provide him with manuscripts and moneys is buttressed by cc:ing a correspondence among multiple non-existent identities, giving the reader an insider glimpse of an entire slice-of-life virtual world. Examples abound at "Flaky Journals", and at "Flaky Journals" again, and at ScholarlyOA, and even here at Riddled.
For a while these spurious personae used the names of actual Ukrainian translators, Venezuelan anaesthesiologists and Bulgarian casino-management freelancers, who were at least sometimes aware that their names were being made synonymous with 'con-job co-conspirator'. The shift to entirely fabricated identities like 'A Siozos' is new.
Anyway, I will give Dylan credit for
Bonus Riddled. You may also enjoy the Siozos-Jimenez scamference on Pharmacology & Toxicology 2020, supposedly held on 1 February, although the webpage is still accepting registration. A ResearchGate discussion / warning still exists. If the Scientific Program is to be believed (yeah right), keynote presentations begin with "Noncanonical amino acids in a cell free TX-TL system" by Marc Finkler... a title copy-pasted from a 2019 Abstract.
UPDATE: There does exist a Scientific Program for Dylan's June 29 2019 ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON GENETICS, and it is just as half-arsed as one might expect. The original prestigious Featured Presentations have been replaced by nine talks best summed up by the title of the last one, "Biomarkers and metabolic shifts of heat‐stressed lactating dairy cows".
If you were expecting a close relationship between the titles of these bizarre presentations and the Abstracts listed in the program, then you are insufficiently acquainted with Dylan Fazel's methods, and his willingness to fill in space with material stolen from published papers.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Jul 9;116(28):14105-14112
Abstract
Preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) with trophectoderm (TE) biopsy is widely applied in in vitro fertilization (IVF) to identify aneuploid embryos. However, potential safety concerns regarding biopsy and restrictions to only those embryos suitable for biopsy pose limitations. In addition, embryo mosaicism gives rise to false positives and false negatives in PGT-A because the inner cell mass (ICM) cells, which give rise to the fetus, are not tested. Here, we report a critical examination of the efficacy of noninvasive preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (niPGT-A) in the spent culture media of human blastocysts by analyzing the cell-free DNA, which reflects ploidy of both the TE and ICM.
Proc. SPIE 9738, Laser 3D Manufacturing III, 973816 (6 April 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2209252
Abstract
Digital medical 3D printing technology is a new hi-tech which combines traditional medical and digital design, computer science, bio technology and 3D print technology. At the present time there are four levels application: The printed 3D model is the first and simple application. The surgery makes use of the model to plan the processing before operation. The second is customized operation tools such as implant guide. It helps doctor to operate with special tools rather than the normal medical tools. The third level application of 3D printing in medical area is to print artificial bones or teeth to implant into human body. The big challenge is the fourth level which is to print organs with 3D printing technology.
This is reaching Trumpian levels of pathetic inadequacy.
Alternative title:
Len Posset, Tim Screevy,
the Reverend Phipps,
Peg Leg Loombucket,
Solly Levy, Ginger Epstein,
Able Seaman Truefitt,
Scotch Lil,
Messrs. Cattermole, Mousehabit,
Neapthigh and Trusspot, solicitors
and Commissioners for Oaths,
Father Thunderghast, Yeti Rosencrantz,
Foo Tong Robinson and Uncle Ted Willis an' all --
And Uncle Ted Willis and all.
Now one person almost as annoyingly persistent as Dylan is "Laura P. Betancourt PSa" from the Archives of Psychology, whose effusions clutter up my spam-tray on a regular basis.
One of the people recruited to become an Editor of Archives of Psychology is probably unaware of the honor as he died a year ago.
No, wait: the "archivesofpsychology.org" site is hosted on the same IP as "mraj.org", registered in a familiar name. That is to say, "Laura" is just another scam from Dylan Fazel again. There's a real Laura P. Betancourt in Mexico who may or may not be aware that he has stolen her identity and photograph and is blessing her with a reputation as a spamming fraudster.
Hello Herr Doktor. How goes it at the top of the world? Are you keeping the bug at bay?
ReplyDeleteWe are not quite in a lock-down situation, though pubs are now recording every patron's contact details so we can be traced in a worst-case scenario.
ReplyDeleteOh, you guys & your functioning gov't.!
ReplyDelete