This is a new phenomenon and business model exploiting gaps in publishing. The cartel uses fake names to produce AI-written or plagiarised papers. Reference lists contain 100s of paid entries.If papers are retracted, no real authors are punished, and citations still count, even from retracted papers

This RedNote post shocked me today. An anonymous user says they are going to upload 60 papers to arXiv soon and are looking for “citation partners” to boost citation counts together by citing each other. Something is seriously wrong in the system of evaluating researchers by citation counts.