[kaitai]

What the OP has done certainly does present a poor representation of the academic system, as a corrupt shakedown system that's milking students for easy cash. Is this incorrect? No. As you said, we get spam emails for conferences like this -- but if students think it's a requirement to publish in order to graduate, why not answer that spam?

Corruption is a huge factor in academic publishing, which relatively well-off and well-connected academics in the UK and US may not realize. A lot of countries trying to increase the visibility and prestige of their academic programs have stupid publishing quotas set by bureaucrats that make less-connected or less-knowledgeable academics ripe targets for these scams. Even in Italy, an EU country with a long academic history in mathematics, rules put in place to combat nepotism favor publication rates that are at best simply orthogonal to measuring the quality of a mathematician's output. India has tons of new colleges and universities and many young academics trying to prove themselves, as well as a recent influx of state funding. The OP's post is an important expose of some of the shenanigans occurring in this new ecosystem.