LinkedIn Fakes: The Rise of Spoof Profiles Mitch Warren August 24, 2024

LinkedIn Fakes: The Rise of Spoof Profiles

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Last year set a new record for fake profiles removed from the LinkedIn platform. This shows that fraudsters are dedicating more time and effort to scams that involve some use of LinkedIn. Fake LinkedIn account volume more than doubled, increasing 152% over 2021 to more than 80 million fake profiles removed in 2022.

Allure Security’s in-house team of takedown experts handles LinkedIn takedowns every day. In this article, we will explain recent scams on LinkedIn. We will also discuss how these scams can harm your brand’s reputation online.

Fake Profiles Removed by Linkedin 2019 - 2022

Chart showing numbers of Fake LinkedIn Profiles over the years

Brand Costs of Fake LinkedIn Profiles

Victims can lose millions of dollars to investment scams on LinkedIn. Brand impersonation also harms businesses and their reputations. As the FBI explained in a warning issued in February 2022, impersonated brands risk the following:

  • Victims of fake job postings may not realize that scammers have deceived them. They might write negative reviews about the fake company, hurting the ratings on company review sites.
  • Similarly, victims may sully a company’s name on social media platforms.
  • Job candidates may avoid companies associated with fake job scams and apply with competitors.
  • Administrative time and cost associated with following-up with victims that applied for fake jobs.

The brand and reputational damage from these scams makes hiring harder. It also puts customer, partner, and investor trust at risk.

Time is of the essence in protecting your brand on LinkedIn. You want to find fake profiles that pretend to be your brand or employees as soon as possible.

Then, get them taken down quickly. Every minute, a fake profile pretends to be your brand online, hurting more people and damaging your brand.

Recent Scams on Linkedin

A variety of different types of scams take place on LinkedIn including:

  • Advance-fee scams
  • Job scams
  • Investment scams
  • Dating/romance scams

Most businesses turn to Allure Security for help with fake profiles. These profiles impersonate their company or employees, both current and former.

They often promote fake job or investment scams. Several state attorneys general have recently warned about “pig butchering.” This scam can start with a LinkedIn message from a fake profile.

Fake Job or Employment Scams

Some businesses ask us for help with fake job postings. These postings impersonate their company on LinkedIn and hurt their employer brand.

The rise in remote work during the pandemic led to more scams. These scams aim to steal personal or payment information and try to trick people into advance-fee fraud.

At a high level, here’s how these scams work:

  1. Scammers create profiles impersonating legitimate companies or employees
  2. They post fake job ads on LinkedIn or other job sites or reach out directly to LinkedIn members with direct messages
  3. Victims apply, sometimes paying application fees or having to divulge personally identifiable information or banking details
  4. Victims undergo fake interviews, usually via teleconference
  5. They are then “hired” and asked to pay fees for equipment. They may also need to provide banking details for direct deposit.
  6. The scammer profits by “collecting” any application or onboarding fees, draining bank accounts or selling the victim’s data

Investment Scams

Some of our financial services customers came to us worried about investment scams on social media. These scams impersonated their brand or individual financial advisors from their company. In a common investment scam, the scammer makes a fake LinkedIn profile. They pretend to be a real financial advisor from a specific firm. 

The “advisor” will reach out to the victim with an investment opportunity, typically involving cryptocurrency. The scammer might first lead the victim to a real trading platform. However, they will later ask the victim to send money to a fake website run by the attacker. At that point, someone loses the money.

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform. Because of this, victims may see investment offers on LinkedIn as more trustworthy. They might think these offers are better than those on Facebook or Twitter.

Pig Butchering

A pig butchering scam is a mix of romance and investment scams. In this type of scam, a scammer builds a digital relationship with the victim. They do this before convincing the victim to invest in cryptocurrency.

It gets its name from the concept of fattening up a pig before slaughter. In this case, the “fattening up” is building the victim’s trust in the fraudster. A pig butchering scam can start on any social media platform, LinkedIn being just one example. A particularly distressing aspect of pig butchering scams is that sometimes the fraudsters themselves are victims of human trafficking.  

Most of the time, a pig butchering scam starts on LinkedIn. However, scammers often try to move the victim to another platform, like WhatsApp. To get a better feeling for how such a scam operates from the victim’s point of view, see this analysis.

Tips for Protecting your Brand on LinkedIn

If you are responsible for protecting your brand online, you can check this list of actions. These steps will help you safeguard your brand and reputation on LinkedIn.

  1. Register your trademarks. A registered and maintained trademark is essential. It helps convince service providers and social media platforms to act against the misuse of your brand.

  2. If your brand hasn’t done this yet, go to the US Patent and Trademark Office website. There, submit an application to register your brand’s trademarks.

  3. Build your brand on LinkedIn. If you don’t have one, create a LinkedIn Company Page. Then, link it to your official website. Decide which staff members will be the page’s administrators. Maintain a regular posting schedule. This will reassure users that the page is active and that your real company is managing it.
  4. Maintain a regular posting schedule. This will reassure users that the page is active and that your real company is managing it.
  5. Manage your LinkedIn brand page permissions: LinkedIn has two administrator tiers – admin and super admin. Collaborate with your peers in security, marketing, HR, and legal teams. Decide which staff members should have specific administrator permissions. Develop and communicate an incident response plan in case someone compromises the company page or any administrator accounts.
  6. Check job listings: Fake job scams are rising on LinkedIn. Regularly search for your brand name on LinkedIn. Ensure that you link only real job listings to your organization. If you encounter fake listings, report them (more details on this process in an upcoming blog post).
  7. Check employees: Like tip 4, regularly confirm LinkedIn members who say they work for your company. Maintaining good hygiene in this area will help ensure that only real employees list your brand as their workplace. This will also reduce the chances of fraudsters creating fake profiles to carry out job, investment, and other scams.

Think about working with an online brand protection organization. This can both save your employees time and save your company brand damage.

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