Thursday, January 18, 2018

MCDA spam

Ye gods, I got an absolute gem of science spam yesterday.
We wish you a happy new year.
Well, at least no greetings of the day, so that is good.
It's so pleasant to communicate with eminent people like you through this email.
Is it brown-nose day already?  I had not noticed.
I believe that your efforts will create the good reputation for my Journal. Our MCDA journal is in shortfall of one article to accomplish the issue. So, we request you to submit any type of article towards our journal. I would be highly obliged with your swift submission process. Hope you will support us.
And this is where it all falls over. Why does this spammer think that I should care about the reputation of their journal? If they were a car dealer, would they say, I believe that your purchase will increase my profits, I need another sale to make my target? As opposed to, say, stressing the price to performance ratio of the car. If they were a university recruiter, would they say, I believe that your enrolment would create the good reputation for my university? As opposed to, say, claiming that the already good reputation of their university would transfer onto the prospective student?

Well, maybe that is what they would do. But that is not how it works. I am not in sales, but even I know that if you are selling something you have to convince the prospective buyer that buying is in their interest, not only in yours.
Await your article submission.
Regards,
Emma Wright Š Modern Concepts & Developments in Agronomy (MCDA)
LLC, Third Avenue, 2nd floor, New York - 10016, USA
If this message is the English of an Emma Wright in New York I will not only eat my hat but a whole stack of them.

Also, just as an aside, the message did not even contain a link to the journal website!

It displays a level of incompetence so profound, so all-encompassingly fractal, that there is truly no hope for this spammer. How can anybody who is able to write an eMail without trying to eat the keyboard look at this spam message and think, yes, this is going to convince people that I am running a serious scientific journal?

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