Ariel Karlinsky was confused. A PhD student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he had just received a message stating the paper he had submitted to an economics conference in Moldova had been accepted.
But Karlinsky hadn’t submitted his work to the conference. In fact, he had never even heard about the event.
At first, Karlinsky assumed a predatory conference had signed him up without his knowledge. But he recognized the name of one of the organizers, the National Institute for Economic Research, which he knew to be legitimate.
Someone, it turned out, was impersonating Karlinsky. On August 11, that someone had submitted one of the researcher’s papers to the conference under Karlinsky’s name from an email address that looked like it could be his. Only because the conference organizers replied to the university email address listed in his paper, instead of the one used for the submission, did the real Karlinsky learn of the scam.
“I have no idea what the impersonator was trying to achieve,” Karlinsky told us. “Had the organizers not emailed me, but him, with acceptance, would he have shown up pretending to be me? This is very confusing and frankly, disturbing.”
Identity theft is a growing threat to academia.1 Fraudsters may impersonate reviewers or former colleagues to make sure articles they or their accomplices write receive favorable reviews. Journals may be hijacked, swindling authors into paying hundreds of dollars for useless publications. Or researchers may find their names on papers they never wrote.
That recently happened to Mohamed Shaaban, an electrical engineer in Taiwan.
A professor at National Chung Cheng University in Chiayi, Shaaban says he was on vacation when found out about the article, published in Results in Engineering in August. The notification came from the journal to his institutional email address, despite the fact it hadn’t been used throughout the study’s submission process or during peer review.
While university email addresses are the go-to means for identity verification, a recent analysis has revealed that fraudsters have found ways to breach this safeguard as well, identifying 94 fake profiles from a pool of thousands set up for AI conferences in 2024 and 2025.
What’s more, the study contained factual errors and some of its figures appear to be generated using artificial intelligence, according to Shaaban, who believes the scam was meant to damage his reputation.
Shaaban immediately informed the journal and took to social media to address his concerns, leading to media coverage.
A couple of days after the paper was published, the journal’s editor-in-chief received an email suggesting the fraudulent article was plagiarized from another study recently published in Applied Energy.2 An anonymous comment on PubPeer suggested the same thing.
Shaaban forwarded us emails from someone claiming to be Yuntian Chen, a coauthor on the Applied Energy study. The emails raise concerns about the now-retracted paper.
Emails from that same address were also sent to Shaaban’s university colleagues and as well as his institution’s president, demanding administrative action against Shaaban. The sender also wrote dozens of other emails, with Shaaban copied, to other universities in Taiwan, the country’s Ministry of Higher Education, The University of Hong Kong (where Shaaban completed his doctorate), and to two universities in Malaysia where he previously worked.
We’ve reached out to Chen, of the Eastern Institute of Technology, in Ningbo, China, for comment but have not heard back.
“A well-tailored plot to smear my reputation as a scholar and academic,” Shaaban wrote on LinkedIn about the experience. “It’s unbelievable to see how evil and criminal [someone] can be.”
The journal retracted the study in September. The notice reads:
After investigating the matter, the institution has confirmed that Prof. Shaaban was not involved in the submission of this article and that a suspicious email address had been used to impersonate him.
But Shaaban, who often posts about research misconduct on his Facebook page, is not satisfied. He wants the paper to be removed entirely from the web and for the journal to conduct an in-depth investigation into who paid the article-processing charge for the manuscript.
“Nobody is writing a paper and submitting a paper on behalf of you for a [top-tier] journal. That doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Elsevier does not “remove the name of an author from a published article, nor do we remove an article solely because an author was added without their consent,” a spokesperson for the company told us. “Removals are considered only in very limited cases, and misconduct of this nature does not typically meet the criteria for removal.”
We reported one of those limited cases in 2023 when three publishers, including Elsevier, removed authors whose names had been forged by another after the publishers received letters from an attorney hired by one of the individuals.
The spokesperson also said Elsevier is reviewing whether other submissions were made to its journals impersonating Shaaban.
Shaaban worries that this saga will affect his career going forward. “It would always be listed in my record that I have a paper retracted,” he says, “and if people wanted to target you, they can easily say you have one retracted paper and they wouldn’t delve into the reasons.”
This article was authored by Frederik Joelving and Dalmeet Singh Chawla, and it was first published at Retraction Watch.
