Fraudsters on LinkedIn

CNBC just wrote an article about the fraudsters on LinkedIn. I was startled by some of the numbers. LinkedIn claimed to remove 32 million fake profiles in 2021 alone. Think about that number for a moment. This means that 32 million fake people were able to join!

I’ve written about LinkedIn before and what a depressing place it’s become. It’s sort of the hangout for the unemployable and marginally successful.

I’ve been using it lately for Infrrd as I search for very targeted customers who may have an interest in some of our team and so far, in spite of my writing personal notes to each one, few respond. I now know why. I too get the constant scam from the Chinese company looking for US representation. I get that one almost every day. It’s an easy fraud to spot because the individual contacting me never has any connections to anyone else. It’s a fraud account that got through, and based on my daily email, it’s a lot who get through.

I’ve long held that LinkedIn is badly managed. I have zero respect for whoever runs the product. In fact, I think they are a political animal who doesn’t think about how the platform began and or even what matters to users. Anyone can create a fake profile and set of company credentials. If you list your history at a big company with some odd title, who’s going to know you weren’t really there?

As it is, I have people who list E@RTC as something they co-founded, when they didn’t. There were only two of us who started the thing. I know of another company that lists over 30 “current” employees when they don’t have half that. Roughly fifteen are former employees, but the CEO is fine with the bigger number because it makes him look more successful than he is.

Ever since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, it’s been a crappy value and of little effectiveness other than for general backgrounders on people I meet. Outside of that, the platform still remains just as useless as it was the last time I wrote about it. The fact that it’s now the the focus of the FBI because of rampant fraud isn’t surprising. In fact, I ask, what too so long?