Tips on dealing with a predatory journal?

[Carlos Puebla Cruz]

Folks, I kinda need some advice from y'all

So I'm currently an undegrad without much experience in publishing scientific papers. Due to the pressure of many of my teachers and peers, I felt the need to get something published so I contacted an open access journal which belongs to the Herald Scholarly Open Access group to publish a review paper I initally made for a class. 

I initially submitted my paper in good faith thinking that it was a legit journal as everything seemed to be in order at first, but after I submitted my paper I started seeing some alarming red flags all over the place. The most alarming one was that the peer-review process lasted only a week and resulted in no major changes to the article other than changing the citation style. They are now asking me to pay a huge sum of money which I cannot and do not want to pay considering that I'm possibly dealing with a predatory journal. I even tried asking for retraction of my article but they are asking me for a withdrawal fee. 

So, has anybody been in a similar situation? If so, could you give me some advice into how to proceed? To be honest, I don't care that much if they go ahead and publish my article anyways (which I've heard some journals do), I just don't want to deal with a journal that could be a scam. 

 

[AP]

Withdraw your article right now. 

[angelsdev]

I have never come across such a situation... But it seems to me that the best thing to do is to try to retract the article and contact some helpdesk, what will help? If there is correspondence or messages demanding payment, where this should not be, then you need to save, take screenshots and ask for help.