Suspect Connection Requests on LinkedIn

Increasingly many of us have been flooded by invitations from people who have some hidden motives when they are trying to connect with us on Linkedin. Sometimes it is unclear what these people will gain from these fake profiles, yet other times it’s more obvious that it’s nothing but an old fashioned 419 scam in progress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/419_scams) that has moved from email to Linkedin. It used to be that these fake profiles were extremely poor quality and easy to spot but lately they are getting better. Some of the hallmarks are:

• Invites by lead generation companies typically sent by attractive, young women
• Middle Eastern Sheikhs from government-linked investment companies or US/Europe based consultants working for these Middle Eastern investment companies
• Board members of banks in Asia
• Bankers or lawyers in Africa with almost no details in their profile
• IP owners in the US or Europe who are trying to sell part of their companies

Few ways to spot them are:

• Model-like, attractive profile pictures
• Long boilerplate profiles with spelling errors or wrong possessive adjectives or personal pronouns
• People allegedly in high positions who contact out of the blue
• Names spelled all in lower case letters or having Mr. or Ms. in front of the profile name
• Spelling mistakes in profile or job description
• Company and job description all spelled in lower case
• Use of stock photos or pictures of famous people

There are various ways of easily finding out of whether the profiles are fake:

• Use Chrome’s “search Google for this image” for profile picture
• Copy/paste profile boilerplate into Google and check if anyone else is using the same profile description
• Low number of connections but a long and detailed profile description and no company logos next to the job description
• No recommendations or endorsements
• People who use yahoo.com or gmail.com for their company contact details
• Company logo missing on Linkedin profile and company cannot be found on Google
• Search for the person’s name on Google turns up nothing else about that person except their Linkedin profile

Anything that says lead generation in the profile is already probably good enough reason not to accept the invite. I believe most of us won’t fall for these malicious requests but every now and then I still hear people excitedly telling how a Hong Kong bank executive has contacted them and how this person is looking at investing in their company. If you come across these invites, it’s best to use Linkedin’s “Block or Report functionality” next to the accept button on the profile page. As the old saying goes: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Stay safe on Linkedin!