LinkedIn Fake Accounts

Introduction

I have been receiving LinkedIn connection requests from beautiful women who have extremely impressive profiles over the recent years. It turns out that those are just completely fake accounts.

In this blog post, I would like to quickly discuss the counterfeits on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Fake Account Examples

This is an example of the connection requests that I received recently from a fake LinkedIn account. The portrait, which was probably AI generated, was very attractive.

The profile was even more amazing. She was an inventor, got a PhD degree, and has been working in the field of data science for over a decade.

Her experiences are more astonishing. Despite moving around the US all the time, he was a VP of Blackstone after working there for only 5 years, a principle data scientist at Apple, VP of JP Morgan. But more recently a senior scientist manager and senior human resources at Boeing. A scientist manager and human resources? WTF?

She got a BA of International Finance from University of Cambridge and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Columbia University. WTF? There was nothing about her enrollment years at all.

There are other fake LinkedIn accounts under a different name which use exactly the same profile and experiences.

It turns out that those fake LinkedIn accounts just copied most of the information from Dane Wu’s LinkedIn account and made some ridiculous modifications.

There are also some other funny fake accounts. I once got a connection invitation from a lady who claimed she is a VP at NVIDIA. I was not sure if she was even aware I worked for NVIDIA. I quickly checked her name in the company phone book but found nothing.

LinkedIn Fake Account Purposes

The first goal of those LinkedIn fake accounts is just to create a connection with your account. Then they could scrape your personal information, such as Email address, and try to scam you. With sufficient number of connections, those fake LinkedIn accounts can also be sold at a good price. Of course, those who are buying LinkedIn accounts must not be doing legitimate things.

How to Filter LinkedIn Fake Accounts

I usually got many LinkedIn connection requests everyday, and I don’t have the time to check each of the applicants carefully. While it’s sometimes time-consuming to find out an account is fake, a real account will usually have a short description about how he or she found me and a strong reason for setting up the connection in the connection request message. So if there is not even a message or your name in the message in a LinkedIn connection request, most of the time, we could safely ignore.