Open access (OA) movement shifts the cost of journal publishing from subscribers to authors. The author-fee model of open access journals, however, has unexpectedly fertilized a new type of unethical for-profit publishers that predate on unaware authors. The predatory publishers lure unknowing scholars into costly traps by deceptively advertising their journals and often publish papers with loose or even no peer review. The corruptive conducts of the predators seriously challenge the existing scholarly communication and the trust within the academia. This paper discusses on the spawning undesirable phenomenon, the roots and symptoms of such unscrupulous practices, and its problems and threats to scholarship.