LinkedIn is the social media network for business people, with over 500 million subscribers.
Generally, users trust LinkedIn more than the other social media services as it has had more real content, less advertising, people behaving better e.g. not posting offensive material and so on.
However, scammers have noticed that people trust messages from LinkedIn more than say from Facebook and aim to take advantage of that.
Scammers may send messages claiming to be someone interesting, but commonly they hijack accounts and use them to send what appear to be genuine messages from real people.
Protect Your Account
- Limit the contact information on your profile – do not include sensitive information such as home phone number or address.
- Don’t click on suspicious links – links in any unexpected message should not be clicked on.
- Think carefully before accepting a connection request from anyone you don’t know in the real world. LinkedIn is great for building a network, but you must know who’s in it and whether they are safe.
Phishing messages are now very common on LinkedIn. These are where the sender pretends to be someone you would trust e.g. a LinkedIn worker or someone from a large well-known business.
They try to con you into giving away key information or financial information or enough personal information to sell to other scammers and identity thieves.
Warning Signs of a Phishing Message:
- Messages containing bad spelling, grammar, and that aren’t addressed to you personally.
- Messages asking you to act immediately.
Common message titles include:-
- Subject: Account Suspended
- Subject: LinkedIn Closing & Termination of your Account
- Subject: LinkedIn Profile Security Alert
- Subject: YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE TERMINATED
If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.
