Beware the request to connect - from a fake

I am quite liberal in accepting connection requests provided there is some evidence of authenticity.

Today, I received a connection request from someone. One of my friends shows up as a common connection. Hmmm, I thought.

As always, I clicked through to the requestor’s profile to take a quick look irrespective of whether they send a private message of why they want to connect or not.

What did I find? Alarm bells:

1. No photo – so who is this?
2. Connections – sum total of 7 at the time of the request. Maybe they are new to LinkedIn or might it be something else?
3. Headline “Cardiac Electrophysiologist / Cardiologist at Clearwater / Cardiovascular Consultant” – impressive though I wonder about their reason for wanting to connect!
4. A search on LinkedIn for the headline found:

- 8 accounts with exactly the same headline

- half of them have exactly the same Summary text

- half of them have the same last name

- almost all have no information in any of the other sections.

My curiosity and “detective’ instinct kicked in.

A visit to the Clearwater Cardiovascular Consultants website – no surprise that none of the names on the LinkedIn accounts are listed.

Boom! Sprung! A fake profile!

Next action – report to LinkedIn as a potentially fake profile.

In the time I took to write this blog, the connection count has gone from 7 to 12; five more people have clicked “accept”.

I don’t normally go to such lengths to check out someone who I suspect may not be who they say they are on LinkedIn. I mostly trust my instincts – if it does not look right, does not feel right, does not smell right, it is probably not right!

This time, I wanted to follow the trail to see if I may be mistaken. And in doing so and sharing how I went about it, I hope it might give you some pointers on what to look out for when someone from left field requests to connect with you on LinkedIn or other social media.

While having an open and diverse network is one of the predictors of success over a closed network, it is nevertheless advisable to keep our radar tuned to filter out the fake or undesirable requests to connect.

Over to you.

Grace Thomas, PCC, brings 'heat and heart' to enable senior executive leaders, leadership teams and emerging leaders in complex, global, multi-national and Australian organisations to be the best they can be in their work, life and world while staying true to who they are. How? Explore | Experiment | Extend | Embed | Empower. She does this as an executive leadership coach and a personal brand master strategist.

#heatandheart #convosthatmatter #personalbranding #networking