A researcher who posted on LinkedIn about an article that plagiarized his work said he is now the target of an email campaign containing false accusations about his articles.

In July, we reported that the work of Sasan Sadrizadeh, a researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, was plagiarized in a now-retracted paper.

“In a seemingly direct “We have had no response to our efforts,” as Sadrizadeh wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, his bosses, colleagues and magazines have been inundated with emails from scammers accusing Sadrizadeh of misusing funds and demanding that his articles be removed. At least one magazine editor appears to have taken the allegations seriously.

Sadrizadeh’s case is reminiscent of the cyberstalking of Harvard Medical School professor Joseph Loscalzo on PubPeer in 2023.

Someone posing as Thomas Hamacher, a researcher and professor at the Technical University of Munich, sent emails to several journal editors in July, claiming to speak on behalf of the German Energy Agency (dena). However, the domain the email came from, “dena-de.net,” is registered to a Squarespace account created in June, according to the WHOIS domain database, while dena’s official email domain is dena.de.net.

In one case, the fake Hamacher sent an email to the editors of several magazines, including Construction and environmental journal And Total Environment Journal, They claim that Sadrizadeh failed to disclose Dena’s funding of the research described in the publications. The emails accuse Sadrizadeh of “misappropriation” of funds and “serious ethical misconduct.” They then demand the “immediate retraction” of the article and “a postponement of the review of publication of all outstanding applications” from Sadrizadeh. “Relevant officials” at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology were copied, including President Anders Söderholm and several vice presidents.

Bin Chen, deputy editor at Magazine for cleaner productionwhere Sadrizadeh has published at least two papers, has reached out to Sadrizadeh after receiving an identical email from the Hamacher imposter. Chen asked for a “prompt and complete response within two weeks” and said he would also consider informing the research institution and funding agency that supported the research. “Please note that if we do not receive an appropriate and timely response, we may have to conclude that the allegations are true,” he said.

Sadrizadeh responded and informed the editor that the emails were spam. Chen told him that the journal now “understood” the case and that he would inform the other editors.

Sadrizadeh told us that he did not receive any funding from dena. The funding number given in the fraudulent emails was “DEA 2024.315.4H”.

Fiona Vonnemann, a member of dena’s legal team, told Retraction Watch that she could “not confirm” whether the subsidy “even exists” and said it was “probably made up”.

On July 30, the Hamacher fraudster sent an email to KTH President Anders Söderholm informing him that “the German Energy Agency has filed a lawsuit against him.”

Sadrizadeh said he sent Hamacher an email informing him that his identity had been impersonated. Sadrizadeh said the two then spoke on the phone and Hamacher was aware of the problem. Hamacher did not respond to our request for comment.

Vonnemann confirmed in an email to Sadrizadeh that “the sender’s email address is not ours.” She also said, “There is little we can do in this situation as these actions do not constitute a crime.”

In an email to Retraction Watch, Vonnemann confirmed that the emails were not connected to dena. “The statements in these emails do not reflect the views of dena in any way. They are obviously spam emails,” she told us.

An unnamed dena representative said in another email that they had contacted dena’s IT department and asked for Sadrizadeh’s Squarespace correspondence “so that I can consider filing charges.” However, Vonnemann said in an email that “the only action we take (from a legal perspective) is to prevent the misuse of an email address that impersonates ours.”

Sadrizadeh emailed Squarespace asking them to investigate the domain and reveal the people behind it. A representative responded that they “take such reports very seriously and actively pursue them.” The domain no longer works and is not available online. Emails we sent to the address used to contact the magazines bounced back.

Squarespace did not respond to our request for comment.

Someone using another email account purporting to belong to Fariborz Haghighat, a researcher at Concordia University, sent an email to several KTH faculty members, including Sadrizadeh, with the subject “No room for energy engineering in the scientific literature.” The email simply contained a link to the PubPeer page of the PhD student Amirmohammad Behzadi mentioned in our original post. Many of his papers contain PubPeer comments accusing Behzadi of over-citing his own work.

Haghighat did not respond to our request for comment.

Although Sadrizadeh told us he believed the comments were another attempt to discredit him and Behzadi, some of the PubPeer comments date back to December 2023, months before he went public with his plagiarism allegations.

Many of the comments contain similar criticisms of unnecessary self-citation. In a comment on the article “4E Analysis of Efficient Waste Heat Recovery from SOFC Using APC: An Attempt to Achieve Maximum Efficiency and Minimum Emissions by Applying Grey-Wolf Optimization,” user “Tricorynus dichrous” commented, “Basic terms do not need to be cited with a source as they are direct explanations of the first and second laws of thermodynamics,” but the article had cited previous work by Behzadi and his colleagues for these equations. If citations were necessary, the authors should have used a primary source such as a book, Tricorynus wrote.

Behzadi declined to comment on these allegations, but Sadrizadeh told us he thought they were “false” and referred us to Behzadi’s SCOPUS profile, which, according to Sadrizadeh, shows only 8% of Behzadi’s citations as self-citations. Clarivate’s Web of Science shows the same percentage of self-citations.

Sadrizadeh said that self-citations are “not only common but often necessary to demonstrate the continuity and evolution of their research.” Otherwise, it is “difficult to trace the evolution of their research and the cumulative knowledge they have contributed to the field.”

In his LinkedIn post about the emails, Sadrizadeh also said that those who had commented on his previous LinkedIn post denouncing the plagiarism of his article received emails accusing him – as well as the journals – of wrongdoing. Ola Eriksson, a professor at the University of Gävle in Gävle, Sweden, who had commented on the first post, responded that he had a “strong suspicion” that the email he had received was “fake.”

Sadreizadeh told us the apparent retaliation against him felt like “organized crime.” “When you go against these kinds of people, they do everything they can to stop you.”

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