Should I Know You?

Help and Caution For My Friends and Contacts On LinkedIn

Over the past few months I have noticed an increase in contacts and connection requests here on LinkedIn. Most of these are legitimate but if a reasonable person were to do some due diligence you will find that you are hitting the connect button with some who are not who or what they say they are.

I value the LinkedIn service. This is the best product for networking and personal branding that exists. With millions of contacts available it is difficult to manage and defend the integrity for us without our help.

How do we help?

• Ask yourself a simple question when you receive in invitation? Why is this person connecting to me?

Recently I received a request to connect by what appeared to be non-executive board member of one of the top 10 banks in the world. Wow, that is so cool, I want to be connected to this person.

After looking at the profile and searching the name I found out that there were 10 other profiles for the same person and the one asking to connect to me just had hit 35 connections. The embarrassing part for this is that some of my connections just connected to this request blindly. It was profile contact phishing. If you share your contacts with those in your network you just provided this person or persons access to contact information for all of your valuable personal and professional connections.

Some simple suggestions for actions to make LinkedIn more secure and valuable.

• Look at the profile before accepting a connection request!
• Does the profile look reasonable?
• Does it make sense that this person is connecting to you. If you are not in the banking business why would a board member of a large bank be connecting to you? Ask yourself the question.
• If you are not sure, search their name. If you find multiple profiles with the same name and with few connections it could be a scam.
• Dig deeper, do a web search if you are still not sure.
• If you suspect a scam, report it to the LinkedIn team to investigate. If it isn't a scam no harm done and we are all a bit safer.

Remember this is the Internet of Us.... We need to value our relationships as much as we value ourselves.

The "Internet of Us" is driving a new form of openness that we need to understand in the future to succeed.

Thank you for reading and your feedback.