Fraud on LinkedIn! Beware!

I've been meaning to post this article for some time now. For some reason I am being targeted by scammers, or maybe even spies!

It always starts the same way. I get a connection request from a profile that depicts a young attractive woman, usually with an Asian look. The accounts used to have very few connections, so they were easy to spot, but recently they have hundreds of connections so they seem more legit.

The "woman" on the other side then sends a greeting, to which I reply politely. Then she starts requesting to move the conversation to WhatsApp, saying that it would be much better to talk there. "What do you want to talk about?", I ask. "Work, life, let's be friends...", she replies.

The conversation continues, where "she" keeps asking for my phone number, and I keep telling her to give me her number and I will call her, which would never happen, of course.

After some time, the photo and name on "her" account change, and the real owner of the account posts an apology, saying that their account was hacked, and someone has been posting through their account.

That last time just happened today. This time I took screenshots of the conversation so that I could post them here. See screenshots below:

The first email I got had the fake name and photo, where LinkedIn notified me that I have a new message from a young woman who could be my daughter. Yay!

And so the conversation started:

I asked her for her own phone number, and some more photos... Hopefully these photos can help the next target identify the scammers, though it's so easy nowadays to generate fake photos that it really isn't likely that they would be reused.

I asked for more details about her location. "She" asked again for my phone number, and I played dumb and replied that I thought that she was gonna send hers...

"She" (or maybe I was chatting with an AI bot the whole time?) started going off the rails...

At this point I had to step outside, so I couldn't take screenshots like before, but she sent a couple of more messages. When I was back at my computer, the account was already restored by its rightful owner. The name and photo were changed back to what I believe to be the originals, by Nana Li:

And a post by that person:

This is not the first time this happens to me, not even the second or third. The exact same thing happened to me a few weeks ago. Same modus operandi. A young and pretty "Chinese woman" who claimed to be in LA and kept asking for my phone number. I was keeping the conversation going, until I got a message from an Israeli software engineer who apologized and said that his LinkedIn account was hacked.

I wish that I had an unused phone line - I would have given out my number on a phone that has nothing of importance - possibly even click the links that they would send, or at least inspect them on a quarantined device. For the time being, though, I am not sure what exactly they were after, and why they keep targeting me.

Does my profile make me seem successful and attractive to scammers? Does it make me look desperate and attractive to scammers? Do I have connections to powerful people and therefore attractive to spies? Maybe I criticized some Communist regimes in posts and they want to keep a close eye on me?

Stay safe, my friends! Here are some tips to avoid getting hacked:

• Use long passwords that you can remember easily, e.g. "Mary had a little lamb :)"
• Use different passwords on different platforms
• Use multi factor authentication where possible
• Keep an eye out for email alerts in case any of your accounts get hacked
• Do not use open public networks to authenticate
• Do not expose unnecessary personal information that can be used for Social Engineering

*post photo from https://nypost.com/2017/07/28/cyber-criminals-use-fake-profiles-as-honey-pot-traps-to-lure-men/