In October 2025, several Hindi dailies reported that a professor from my department has been accused of defrauding forty-nine scholars through a conference that promised publication in a Scopus-indexed journal after peer review. I had sent a paper to that conference. It was not a naive decision. The paper had been moving through journals since 2022 with two rejections, multiple revisions, and neglect for several months. When the call for papers arrived from a colleague, I recognised it as a shortcut and went ahead. I wanted the work to appear somewhere rather than remain an unfinished file on my desktop.