Combatting Fake Employee Accounts on LinkedIn — Apriorit’s Experience

People on LinkedIn can lie about working at your company, and it seems like there isn’t much you can do about it.

What’s one of the first things you pay attention to when you communicate on LinkedIn? Our guess is — their current employment place.

But are you sure a specific person really is related to the company they claim to be part of??

Because as Apriorit’s experience showed, they may not be.

As a company with a special dedication to cybersecurity, we feel that it’s our duty to not only share our own story but also help you prevent your own incidents from happening. We also want to attract the attention of LinkedIn officials so that they implement an efficient technological solution to this problem as soon as possible.

What happened?

Recently, we noticed several LinkedIn profiles on which people claimed to be part of Apriorit. If you ever watched this TED Talk by Chris Duffy, who got away with claiming to be the CEO of LinkedIn (for some time), then you already know a bit about this issue.?

These profiles had the same relation to our company as Chris Duffy did to LinkedIn — none.?

When some of these accounts started sending connection requests to our real employees, we were deeply concerned and not without a reason.

Upon further investigation, we discovered a large number of presumably fake accounts claiming to be current Apriorit employees, including those of a high rank, like a hiring manager or a CTO. And while Chris Duffy obviously did what he did for experimental purposes, people who pretended to be our employees most likely didn’t share the same intentions.

What are the risks for businesses?

Unfortunately, LinkedIn gives businesses no means to prevent non-employees from listing them as their employer.?

This presents the business community on LinkedIn with all sorts of risks:

• Loss of clients, new and existing — If other businesses believe they were communicating with your company, anything can happen: they may receive poor quality service or no service at all, and service costs may be different from your usual rates. In any case, you risk losing both revenue and the trust of your clients.
• Loss of new hires — People who are convinced they were applying for jobs at your company may fall victim to scammers while your team will be deprived of potentially great talents.
• Data leaks — Be it clients or potential hires, they may send their sensitive data to malactors and blame you for anything that happens to their data because fraudsters used your company’s name.
• Reputational damage — Your community will no longer see you as the reliable and trustworthy partner you are.

After Apriorit’s CEO Klaudia Zaika first reached out to the community and shared about this issue, we were contacted by several people who were having job-related discussions with the fraudulent accounts.

There were cases when a person behind the fake account of our employee was contacting other people on LinkedIn with job offerings:

Now imagine if such an imposter contacts your potential clients or candidates for open roles at your company. This may have a devastating impact not only on your brand’s reputation and trustworthiness but, most importantly, on people who otherwise would have a chance at building great relationships with your company.

So, what can we do?

While the Apriorit team started acting immediately, turned out there wasn’t much we could do to fix this.

Here’s the action algorithm we suggest:

1. Reach out to account holders. Get in touch with the discovered accounts to make sure there’s no mistake. We contacted the holders of suspicious accounts and requested that they remove any mention of Apriorit from their accounts. At least with one of the initially discovered profiles, the case turned out to be about a typo in the company’s name and not a deliberate scam.

2. Request support from LinkedIn. Let the LinkedIn team take part in addressing this issue and preventing similar cases from happening in the future. Unfortunately, when our personnel contacted LinkedIn support, we discovered that this platform's capabilities are less flexible and secure than we’d like them to be.

3. Enable work email verification. LinkedIn offers several profile verification options to its users: identity, education, and workplace. As a company, you can enable the verification of your employees by corporate email. This won’t prevent LinkedIn users from listing your company on their profiles for no reason but will help your community distinguish genuine profiles from fake ones.?

And make sure to ask your employees, especially top-level ones, to validate their profiles using corporate emails!

Make work email verification a golden rule in your company and let your community know about it so that you can protect your potential clients and candidates from encountering a fraudster.

For example, one of the accounts that has Apriorit wrongfully listed as their employment place is, in fact, verified by LinkedIn:

But, as you can see, they were only verified using their college email. There’s no proof that the person behind this profile has any relation to Apriorit.

As of now, we can’t neither block this account nor remove Apriorit from the list of their employment places due to the lack of corresponding functionality on LinkedIn.

But what’s important for you to know is this:

All top-level employees of Apriorit are verified using their work emails.

4. Block the fraudsters. Ask your team to help with this one. Apriorit’s real employees helped us report fake accounts, and most of these accounts have already been taken down by the platform.

5. Educate your team. As detecting such accounts isn’t easy, especially for large companies, your team should be well informed about the risk. In this case, they’ll be able to help you identify potential fraudsters faster.

Notifying our employees about the incident and telling them what to do if and when they notice a similar issue was one of the first things we did at Apriorit. Here’s the simple algorithm we provided them with:

• Double-check if the person really is a part of your company before accepting their connection request
• Report the case to the responsible personnel if the request happens to come from a potentially fraudulent or fake account
• Report the detected malicious accounts to LinkedIn so that the platform can notice the problem and ban these accounts

6. Monitor and adjust. Continue monitoring this issue and keep doing what you can to prevent malicious actors from misusing your company’s name.

We officially ask LinkedIn to implement a feature that will make all these steps unnecessary and help businesses protect their operations and public image, as well as stop the further spreading of fake employee accounts within this platform.

If you were contacted by someone who claims to be part of Apriorit but you suspect that they weren’t verified by work email, please let us know in the comment below or send an email to [email protected].

Did you have a similar case? What are your thoughts on the way LinkedIn is currently handling this issue? Share in the comment section!