[7][8] Organisers of predatory meetings include the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET) and the OMICS Publishing Group; however, there are many other organizations directly targeting students, faculty, and other researchers with invitations to participate in this type of conferences.
"[1] Other groups have used this approach, one example being the once-every-five-years "International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology" organised by the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland for Brisbane in August, 2016, was preceded by the predatory World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET)–organised International Conferences on Traffic and Transport Psychology in Osaka in 2015 and Chicago in 2016.
[citation needed] Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor in information technology at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, was invited to attend a conference, organised under OMICS' ConferenceSeries banner,[13] on atomic and nuclear physics to be held in late 2016.
Having little knowledge of this subject as an IT professor, Bartneck used iOS's autocomplete function to write a submission, choosing randomly from its suggestions after starting each sentence using words like "atomic" and "nuclear",[6] and submitted it under the name Iris Pear (a reference to Siri and Apple).
[1] Characteristics of predatory meetings which are similar to those attracting criticism in predatory publishing include: Rapid acceptance of submissions with poor quality control and little or no true peer review;[14] acceptance of submissions consisting of nonsense or hoaxed content;[6][14] notification of high attendance fees and charges only after acceptance;[6] claiming involvement of academics in conference organising committees without their agreement,[1] and not allowing them to resign;[5][15] mimicry of the names or website styles of more established conferences,[7] including holding a similarly named conference in the same city;[1] and promoting meetings with unrelated images lifted from the Internet.
[8] On 25 August 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against the OMICS Group, iMedPub, ConferenceSeries, and Srinubabu Gedela (the Indian national who is president of the companies), partly in response to on-going pressure to act against predatory publishers.
[16] The court ruled in favor of the FTC in March 2019, and ordered Srinubabu Gedela and his companies to pay $50.1 million in damages.