Student put my name in the acknowledgement section despite the fact I have never talked to him A high school fresh graduate was applying to undergraduate schools in the united states. He is a friend of a family acquaintance. Despite the fact that I did not even know his name, I was surprised when the family acquaintance asked me to write a letter of recommendation for him and for his friend. I do not know them at the slightest level. It seems that they were working on a research project, which looks completely silly to me (paranormal research related to the secrets of the pyramids, I did not bother to look carefully). I refused the requests to write the letter of recommendation. In the letter that the student sent me for me to submit, he says I worked with him on various things and I think that he is a genius. This was completely dishonest.
Now, I discovered that the student posted the said project on pyramid secrets (I think it is related to non-sensical theories on generating power from triangular structures) on a website, called academia.edu. In the acknowledgement section, he repeated the same claims that I worked with him on the project. I actually have never talked with him before. Now, I am a graduate student in science. This has been incredibly annoying to me. I wonder what is the best way to proceed. I have sent that person a message on academia.edu but he did not respond. I do not know how to contact him. I tried looking for a way to contact academia.edu to report this dishonest behaviour, but I do not know if there is a way to contact them. Any suggestions will be helpful.
Move on. There is little you can do about it: People can claim whatever they like on the internet and if they say that you worked with them, that's a nuisance but there is little you can do about it (in most jurisdictions) as long as they do so on websites that do not have strong ethics. academia.edu is not one of those websites with strong ethics.
Continue to do good work and build a reputation for yourself through your own publications. That's what you should focus on. The likelihood that anyone will find the pyramids publication is pretty small, and in the worst case if someone asks you about it, you can always explain the story (or just say that that must be someone else with the same name as you).