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
So you should look at this discussion of parasitical publishers and mockademic scamferences, in which the participants share their experiences with the unrelenting blizzard of spam from Dr Siozos (putative editor of the Archives of Applied Medicine), pimping his "Annual Conference on Genetics 2019" scamference in Vienna and his "2019 Global Conf. on Neuroscience and Neurology"...
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 Chrcanovicadded a reply
RG claimed that "[they] received a Notice of Claimed Defamation from Archives of Applied Medicine, asserting that they have a good faith belief that certain portions of the content constitute defamation to them."
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:
Here 'KEI' is 'Knowledge Enterprises Incorporated': parasitical publisher of 'Medical Research Archives' and 'Internal Medicine Review' and a few others that are frozen in stasis. So it is not entirely by coincidence that KEI and AoAM use the same
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.
Dylan's gateway into the exciting world of virtual publishing (which is hard for one to leave, just as the elephant-poop-sweeper in the joke is loath to quit show-biz) was the Astronomical Review - an academic Salon des Refusés, providing autodidact would-be cosmologists with a convenient outlet for their original and challenging theories about the origin of the universe, without the hassle of cyclostyling those theories onto densely-written A4 pages and sellotaping them to the walls of bus-shelters.
Dylan recruited an Editorial Board of world-renowned luminaries from theoretical and experimental physics for this journal, including Roger Penrose and Jean-Pierre Luminet and Francis Everitt and NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, all content to follow his guidance as E.-in-C... or so he claimed, though one must bear in mind his fabulatory tendencies. This is all moot because in 2014 he sold the journal to Taylor & Francis, leaving him with time to found KEI and program his spam-bots. So now you know the back-story. The moral is that pimping out one's journals with wholly fictitious claims can be profitable.
T&F hiked the Article Publishing Fee from $25/page to a flat charge of $750 / £469 / €625 and imposed some standards on what they would accept. Bereft of submissions from Intergalactic Cracked Pots (and of the prestigious Editorial Board), Astronomical Reviewclosed its doors in 2018 after a less-than-glorious history. Someone with Whackyweedia privileges might want to reverse Dylan's self-promotional vandalism of the Wiki entries for Richard Penrose and Jean-Pierre Luminet, from October 12, 2012.
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.