During the end of my bachelor's studies, I completed my thesis, based on which I later submitted an article that was published to a conference's proceedings.

After some time, I was contacted in my student email from an American Academic publishing company, with the email title being 'Invitation from [Journal Title] - We are interested in publishing some new papers from you'

When I first saw the email, I wasn't suspicious about it, I was actually very surprised and excited that someone had taken interest in my work and wanted to publish it. I had even started to think about how I was going to re-write my article to fit the writing specifications - and how to translate it in English because it was in my mother tongue.

It was not until I re-read the email many times and checked their website which looked very outdated, that I got suspicious. My first reaction was that I googled 'is [Publishing Company Name] a scam?' for which I didn't find any clear answers, but nothing stating the opposite as well, so I decided to ignore the email.

Looking back at this experience now, it's blatantly obvious that it was a predatory journal, but at that time I was not exposed to those kind of incidents. I present some sections of the email that I know understand are completely aligned with the predatory journal characteristics.