Indian Journal of 419 Scamming

Some time back I wrote an article for Chemistry in Australia entitled ‘Crowd Funding and Chemistry’. I must have been pretty bored at the time since this is not a great subject to write about and subsequently I wouldn’t recommend that anyone reads this article. In truth, chemistry is best left to the corporations.

In any case, last week I get this spurious email from the Indian ‘Chemical Industry Digest’. They just happen to be doing a whole annual issue on crowd funding and chemistry and wondered if I could contribute.

Now there is 99% chance that this is a scam. But it’s a pretty elaborate one at that. They must crawl through industry journals and extract the author’s details and the subject matter, and turn the latter into a form email. As per below.

I wrote back saying ‘yeah, would love to etc’. They wanted an article. I said they could have the one I already have for free. They tried to engage with me to get me to write a longer one. I told them to suck it up and take what they got for free. They decided I was hard work and went silent on me.