The Person you just added on LinkedIn might be Fake

A recent trend amongst my colleagues is an uptick in connection requests from total strangers. While this is not out of the ordinary for LinkedIn recruiters, a concerning question one must ask before accepting is: “are these accounts fake?”

In May of this year, Shannon Bond of NPR published an article about computer-generated LinkedIn profiles. In it, an individual named Keenan Ramsey reached out to her on the site. After investigating, Bond made an uncanny discovery: Keenan Ramsey was AI generated and never existed. During their investigation, NPR found several companies that sell bot accounts to drum up interest about a service or product. While fake profiles are against LinkedIn TOS, they are difficult to efficiently catch and the scale required to stop machine generated accounts is astronomical.

These fake accounts range from creepy to outright malicious. They’re thinly veiled information gathering at best, phishing attempts and corporate espionage at worst. Within the past year, I’ve heard numerous stories from peers regarding attempts to solicit confidential information out of them, and one individual attempted to social engineer a response out of me regarding my employer (Funnily enough, I didn’t have a permission level high enough to answer their question, Principle of Least Privilege working as intended).

In order to defend yourself, learn to recognize the many factors that give away their façade:

· They use common names (After applying to a Japanese tech company, I was bombarded with connection requests from people named “Tanaka Taro”, a John Doe-esque name)

· They claim to work for large companies to add credibility, or they’re employed by a company that you and Google have never heard of

· They conveniently do not work for your employer so you cannot look them up in your directory

· Very low activity on account, lack of information regarding prior employers and education or boiler plate responses

· They send a vague, friendly message to test the waters, grammatical errors and misspellings are likely

· They use stock model photos or AI generated imagery as their pictures

On the last point, a quick Google image search can find stock model photos if you suspect the user is fake. AI generated imagery is a bit tougher but Ms. Bond’s graphic on key giveaways is helpful. Unfortunately the onus is on the user to protect themselves unless LinkedIn implements a heavy verification process, which will likely frustrate everyone.

You can find Ms. Bond’s article here: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles