A conference to avoid?

MEI's Amanda is a woman of many talents, but she would be the first to admit that metallurgy does not count among them. So she was a little surprised to receive a formal invitation to join the organising committee for the upcoming Metallurgical Engineering & Mineral Processing Conference, scheduled to be held on August 04-06, 2025 in Frankfurt, Germany.

The invitation states that "we have carefully reviewed your impressive contributions and eminence in the field of Metallurgy and Mineral Processing. Your expertise and insights would greatly enrich our conference, and we believe you would be an excellent fit for the Conference".

Echoes of WASET came to mind, the series of conferences that we exposed in 2013 and were shown, judging by the 130+ comments, to have no place on a calendar of respected international conferences, such as that published by MEI.

So I tested the Frankfurt conference just as I did 11 years ago and and submitted my WASET paper, which would not pass even the briefest of professional appraisals, let alone a rigorous peer-review. It was basically a "technical note" summarising my April Fool's Day blog of 2012 :

"Could homeopathy provide the key to collectorless flotation?".

It was total nonsense, but just over a week later I was honoured to receive a formal email to advise that my abstract had been accepted by the review committee for in-person presentation. And the crunch- I was kindly requested to confirm my slot via a given link, which required me to register with payment. I could also pay for accommodation via the link, although there was no mention of where this might be, apart from Frankfurt, which is a fairly big city!

I responded by saying that I was surprised to hear that my paper had been accepted for presentation after peer-review, with no revisions necessary, as I felt that the paper was not perfect and I was hoping for some feedback. I asked if they could let me know who was on the review panel, but so far I have had no response.

It's fairly obvious that this is a conference to avoid. The fact that there is no venue mentioned on the website, and that they require money upfront suggests strongly that this is a money-making scam.