Welp

Welp - A myriad of random bogus "academic" conferences in my Inbox

Apparently, sometime in the last six months my work e-mail account, somehow, ended up in some sort of mailing list -maybe more than one? - for what appears to be bogus (or of doubtful quality) academic conferences. It seems that there are hundreds of them as well.

Within the last 48 hours I received invitations for 8 different conferences to participate from Keynote Speaker to Technical Program Chair to Distinguished Guest and there seems to be no end to it. And these have been around for a long time....

 Which brings me to my two questions:

1. How do you unsubscribe from these mailing lists? There is no link to do that at the end of any of the emails, so I guess this is my life now. 
2. Who the hell attends conferences like these? The cost of registering for any of these conferences is around US$400 - $500. Do people actually spend that amount of money from their budgets without any prior quality checks on what the conference is all about and who the organisers are?

I would expect that after a while the number of such conferences would drop as people become more aware of what takes place. Even ABC Radio published a story on the topic almost a year ago!

But with their numbers increasing, apparently people make money by doing this. So until more people become more aware and stop wasting money, my only reaction would be:

"RIP Inbox!"