I recently received an email from a predatory event. I usually ignore them, but I just found it hilarious since they “selected” me for the best researcher award… in high energy physics! The funny part is that I have never done anything even remotely related to high-energy physics.
So I decided to play along trying to get the award without actually having to pay for it (this was the real challenge, after all). After some exchange of emails, I was included in the list of winners!
So, how do they manage to make such a list of winners? It’s quite easy, besides asking the general domain (high-energy physics) they also ask you to specify sub domains and specific contributions. In this way everyone can receive a different award. For example, in my “group” there were more than 8 pages of awardee!
However, this got me thinking: “can I also get an obviously ridiculous award? Like expert of Prosciutto?”
We will see in the next weeks…