How to spot a Brian Williams War Story, on LinkedIn

In China's business world, where I started my career, stories of conmen were elevated to an art form in the early and mid-2000s by the community of bloggers and early social media adopters that opened the gates to an unprecedented flow of information from inside China. The most interesting of the conman affairs even started a three-letter, worldwide Twitter trending topic, and the scariest involved a relatively prolific American blogger who, it turns out, had been convicted of mail fraud in the U.S. and attempted murder in Japan.

Stories like these were also why due diligence and risk control firms in China and other developing markets in Southeast Asia have done so well over the past twenty years.

I bring this topic up is because I recently ran a due diligence check on an Asia-based business person. The check was triggered by a particularly outlandish back story. With a lot of help from LinkedIn I was able to figure out that the person in question had fabricated his background in troubling ways.

I think that the LinkedIn-based techniques I used can be universally helpful to members of the LinkedIn community, so I created this 5-step guide that approximates my method. The list is an abbreviated representation of the steps I followed to unmask the suspected deception of a person (formerly) in my business network, but it is certainly not a complete list of how LinkedIn can be used to run a due diligence check on a person or an organization. So, by all means, please add to this list in the comments section.

How to Spot a Conman Using LinkedIn: The Guide

Step 1. Become a connection of the person you're vetting

This is the foundation of everything else, although it may seem unsettling. But chances are that you've already made contact with the conman you're vetting, so this shouldn't be that much of a burden. The reason you must do this is that in order to have access to LinkedIn profile data and the profile PDF you need to be connected to someone. The PDF and cross-checking of that profile data using LinkedIn's various search tools are the main methods for the LinkedIn-based due diligence search.

Step 2. Download LinkedIn PDF resume, compare to other online info

LinkedIn has a great feature that allows you to download a person's resume with all published information that a person has on their profile. Download this and print it. As you look at this information you should understand that this information represents two types of information:

1. Information that the person feels is safe to place because it is either verifiable, or because it is relatively innocuous.
2. Information that the person feels they must put on their LinkedIn resume because other public information has locked them into presenting that as part of their identity. Call this the Brian Williams War Story portion of their resume.

The goal is to figure out which of the data there is safe, and which is there because public records outside of LinkedIn demand it be there for the sake of consistency. The latter type of data is where the conman is most vulnerable. The former type of data though verifiable may likely represent accomplishments made possible by the con itself. For example, someone may have been able to publish a book about a particular industry, but the only chance they received that chance is because they falsified their credentials and background when presenting the book to a publisher.

The goal is then to do a comprehensive Google search for the person and any of her aliases and note any inconsistencies.

Inconsistencies may include information that did not make it onto the LinkedIn resume even though it seems very important to the person's identity outside of LinkedIn. For example, a flyer for a conference that the person attended may list an MBA, an MD, or other professional credential, but that credential is missing on LinkedIn.

And then you want to look for information that is similar to the LinkedIn information but is otherwise slightly off in unsettling ways. An example of this might be that an individual lists an MBA on their LinkedIn profile, but that credential is listed as an EMBA or a business management summer course in public sources. Or, more commonly, a conman may say that he spent ten years with a certain firm when writing on his website, or in advertisements for a particular work he's completed, like an e-book, and the LinkedIn record indicates a much shorter period.

Step 3. Verify educational certifications by using mutual connections data

As hinted at in Step 2, conmen tend to over-inflate their educational certifications on their public profiles, and the easiest way to do this is to lie about the schools that they attended. While pulling records from the National Student Clearinghouse is a good way to confirm a degree has been earned, some schools don't disclose to the Clearinghouse. This is particularly the case with many elite institutions, and elite institutions just happen to be the sweet spot for many conmen, especially the ones working abroad where having an international brand pedigree behind one's name can be tempting for foreign nationals little experience in the American educational economy.

LinkedIn to the rescue! As a matter of course, to establish basic consistency, conmen will list the same false certifications on their LinkedIn profile that they put elsewhere online. What you want to do (again, if you can't get National Student Clearinghouse data) is figure out what class year a con claims to have graduated from. If it doesn't say anything on the profile or online, then establish a range of dates by aging the conman through college graduation dates, photos, etc.

What you can do then is run a search for people from the claimed institution (this is one of LinkedIn's default search filters) and perhaps in the conman's key industry. Since the conman is your friend, you'd expect to see several names in the resulting list, whether they are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd degree LinkedIn connections, to be a mutual acquaintance of the conman. If you see no mutual connections, that should be a red flag.

Also, don't get fooled if a conman has joined alumni groups. Even though many alumni LinkedIn groups have gotten wise to fakers in recent years, it is surprisingly easy to gain entrance to alumni groups without legitimate credentials.

Step 4. Use the Foreign Service Institute's Language Difficulty Ranking to Spot Bogus Claims of Proficiency

LinkedIn's language mastery profile section is a great place to show off your true talent, but claimed language competency has always been the realm of conmen, all the way back to Marko Polo, who probably never reached China.

I'll admit that I am very sensitive to people who falsely claim fluency in difficult languages after a few short years in a foreign country, and that's because I actually put in the work to learn Chinese (I have a Masters in Chinese Studies that required advanced language course completion), and that one skill took me years of in-country living and years of intense language learning to acquire.

One way to verify that LinkedIn language block, and then to turn it into a tool for spotting a conman is to learn how to use the FSI's language difficulty ranking, which can give you a good idea of how difficult it is for a an English speaker, after a particular study time, to 'reach “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)”.'

The difficulty of reaching general professional reading and speaking proficience Spanish for an English speaker (24 weeks, or 575 hours for competence), pales in comparison to the difficulty of an English speaker to accomplish the same feat in Arabic or Chinese (88 weeks or 2200 hours).

As a general rule of thumb, assume someone has 22 weeks of language study in them per year, when working a 40 hour per week schedule. So a bit over one year should be required for proficiency in Spanish, assuming a relaxed works schedule, and four years for Korean or Arabic.

When looking at someone's resume and claims, you should be able to deduce if there was time in a person's schedule to put in the time required. If someone, for example, claims that over a ten year period they learned both Arabic and Korean, all while being a top executive in a field that requires 80 hour work weeks, like finance or consulting, and while taking time to teach in a university and write a book, then you are either looking at the resume of one of the world's once in a century geniuses, or you're looking at someone that is stretching the truth.

Check wikipedia, just to make sure that you're not looking at Isaac Newton, and then consider if the language fluency is a core part of the sale for that particular person. If the person is a claimed expert on a region or an economy becuase, they claim, they have advanced ability to read Korean and communicate with Korean speakers, then it's time to question the entire make up of the person.

Step 5. Don't be afraid to use those Inmails

When you have a good case that you might be dealing with a conman, it's time to use your Inmails. The goal is to contact people who should be in the conman's claimed networks. Does your suspected conman claim to have gotten an MBA from Harvard in 1998? Find someone in your network, or just outside of it, and send an email or an Inmail to ask, "Hey, I'm doing due diligence on [name] because of a potential business deal I am looking at. You know him and you know my friend, [name], do you or anybody you know have any information on this person?"

In the end, even if you don't get a response, it's worth a shot. Due diligence is a normal, smart part of business life.

Does anyone have other tips for using LinkedIn to run due diligence?