I don’t really know more about the David Publishing group than you but I doubt it is affiliated with China. They first harvested my name and the title of my presentation several years ago after I presented at a Southwestern Pop Culture conference in Albuquerque. Like you I did some research on them. In my opinion they especially prey on people relatively new to academia hoping to publish. I have warned my students who travel to conferences to ignore any emails from them. Any queries or engagement with them only leads to more harassment. If we get the word out to everyone to just mark their emails as junk, they will have fewer people to annoy. In this digital age, conference programs are readily available online, so they can easily harvest our names, presentation titles, and school affiliations. Then it’s a simple task to search for our email. They could be anywhere, and everywhere, and still pester the unsuspecting. I doubt there is a painless way for legal recourse since it is not illegal to approach us with their alleged publishing opportunity. Clearly they have found enough people to make this lucrative to continue and I, for one, would rather use my energy more productively.
P Herron <pgstover@utep.edu>